Elisa Gabbert's The French Exit

So, the blog world has been telling me about this new press, Birds LLC, and this new book, The French Exit by Elisa Gabbert. And I’ve been thinking, I should buy this book. And then I walk into my office, and what is sitting on my desk? Review copy! This was very exciting for me. I am not usually important enough to get review copies of anything. And to be fair, I think it was actually in Phoebe’s mail. Fortunately the poetry editor over at Phoebe is my roommate and friend, Moriah Purdy. She will probably forgive me for swiping it.

Gabbert has done some pretty fun stuff as a guest over at HTMLGiant, like this amazing list of “moves” in contemporary poetry and a recent bar graph of personal clichés in reviews, blogs and books, and I’ve seen parts of her collaborative work with Kathleen Rooney before, so I was really interested to read the book. And the title is sexy. “Exit” is such a cool word.

So, I had to look up what the phrase “French exit” actually means, and it refers to when someone leaves a place stealthily, without saying goodbye. It seems to be used in the context of social events/parties. . . when someone sneaks away and is gone when you turn around to look for them. What’s satisfying about this is that so much of Gabbert’s book deals with dream-like experiences and fears. This is what dreams so often do, sneak away before you’re done with them, leaving you feeling powerless, afraid of your own impotence. There are a few moments in the book where she really nabs my most common, terrifying dream experience—feeling in some way paralyzed. In the first poem, “Commissioned,” she writes:

You find a notebook, the first several pages

filled in with your own writing, red pen.

You must know what it says.

But in the dream you can’t read it.

In dreams there’s no quality to the weather.

But an orange sky, hanging. Something it means.

Your own writing in red! Urgent and intimate but you can’t access it! I have recurring dreams where I’m being attacked up against the fence in the front yard of the home I lived in growing up, and people are very close by who could save me, but I CAN’T SCREAM. I HAVE NO VOICE. TERRIFYING.

She ends “Decoherence,” “I keep thinking about a woman I met. / One day, approaching an intersection, / she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to stop walking.” This reminds me of a common dream I have where I’m walking down a busy road w/o sidewalks. There’s plenty of room on the shoulder of the road for me to walk, BUT I CAN’T WALK STRAIGHT. I keep veering into traffic. I can’t stay out of the road. I have no control over my body. I know I’m going to get hit by a car. Please email with psychoanalysis.

Anyway, so much of desire (our dreams) is also fear, and Gabbert complicates desire and anxiety. This was a refreshing take on human want. And yet the language comes off as poet-casual. She makes the meta-poetic conversational (throughout the book, but the second section, in particular, is comprised completely of “Blogpoems” she wrote for a project on Chris Tonelli’s blog), isn’t afraid of puns, and has some really playful conceits (“Where do holes go / to die? Their cemetery / sure would seem a waste / of space—all those graves / of graves. . . “).

So, there are a million off-site events I want to see at AWP, and Gabbert is reading at one of them. It’s Thursday night at Mercury Café, and it’s hosted by six small presses, including Birds, LLC. There are a bunch of other readers, too, so if you’re interested, check it out on the AWP site.

-Megan

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