RE: Elisa Gabbert's The French Exit

First of all, my dreams consist almost exclusively of me successfully lifting heavy objects or dolphin-skiing around glistening Lake Beasley (the proper technique of dolphin-skiing: step 1, put one foot on one dolphin, step 2, repeat, step 3, ski) while people on the shore applaud and feed me grapes. This is all to say that I'm worried about my colleague Megan, and encourage her to go seek out a dream doctor who will help her with her dreams (because those exist and I learned about them in dream medical school, duh). In any case, despite the fact that my psyche is extremely healthy and has excellent muscle definition*, I really enjoyed Elisa Gabbert's poems in The French Exit, particularly those that deal with the dreamlike imagery that Megan discussed.

*the opposite of that

I particularly love the lines in "Decoherence" quoted by my esteemed co-blogger, though I like them more when taken as swinging toward realism rather than the surrealistic: "I keep thinking about a woman I met. / One day, approaching an intersection, / she was afraid she wouldn't be able to stop walking." I've had moments where that kind of self-destructive impulse seems to raise itself over the horizon in a way that seems to draw me to it, unalterably. It reminds me of that opening passage in Moby-Dick (I promise I've read other books) where Ishmael's confessing his vaguely suicidal impulses: "...it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off." Both Ishmael and the speaker in "Decoherence" want to avoid these self-destructive encounters, but both feel as if doing so is almost impossible, out of their control. It hits me as being pretty real, the kind of crystalline sentiment I'd feel uneasy revealing in my own work but would reward in someone else's texts with exclamation points in the margins.

The Blogpoem section of the book is probably my favorite, and Gabbert gives us more of those sharply captured moments of anxiety. "Lousy Day Blogpoem" goes, "Was the end of a lousy day. Drank too much / and everyone agreed my emotions were implausible." What's up with everyone doing that all the time?! My emotions always seem plausible to me, and even if most everyone seems to be in the other camp too frequently for my comfort, Gabbert gets it. Thanks for that!

--Corey