The Complete Stories by Noah Warren

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Complete Stories by Noah Warren Amanda Auerbach (bio) The Complete Stories, by Noah Warren (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), 96 pp., $16 Noah Warren’s second poetry collection, The Complete Stories, begins with an introductory poem entitled “Preface to the Second Edition,” followed by five sections of poems. The sections build narratively, like the chapters of a novel or like the stories in a linked collection. At its outset, the speaker feels a lack of emotional investment in his own writing, and a sense of inertia transforms his relation to words: “Some pages have almost nothing on them, maybe / eight words floating in eggshell space. / They have to be read too, // so I do, I drift over them.” The poem then drifts from the two piles of manuscript pages to another two piles—the sleeping bodies of the speaker’s lover and dog between whom he sleeps. As the speaker gets up from between them to pee at four am: “You were the slope of a shoulder, / the glow of heat beside me, and I could love that.” Love is here defined as aesthetic engagement with a physical object, like the words floating in eggshell space, rather than an interpersonal emotion. Hence the speaker “could love that,” rather than her. The “that” repeats twice more toward the end of the poem: [End Page 477] You know this: there was a timewhen I hung large silver gelatin photographs of glacierson the walls of my bedroom.I was able to sleep like that. They were his photographs. When I was small, he’d talkfor hours about the different kinds of ice,about glaciers, and how they “calved.” I loved thatI could feel it. I felt the huge jewels falling onto me. The photographs of glaciers, which embody isolation, suggest a conception of sleep as drifting off into the distance—a sleep that preserves individual boundaries. The speaker can sleep “like that.” Similarly, the speaker can love the father by emotionally engaging with this image that has “calved” or split off from the father himself. In the next poem, “Rustling Mind,” the speaker uses the power of storytelling to merge the self with its environment, mother and child: “A kettle moans, you stir. / Mother smooths your hair.” As the young child experiences himself as merged with the mother, so too does the poet imagine himself as merged with the outside world, as in the pathetic fallacy. The second section, beginning with “Wind,” focuses more on the inter-penetration between the self and other people. In “Scarcity Theory,” Warren claims, “No—my friends helped, / I let them once I could read them.” The next section that begins with “Calendar” worries that what people consider interpersonal experiences, such as romantic love, may not be interpersonal at all. In “Jetty,” for instance, a “Not-us flowed through us, a thorn milk, / a blindness.” In “Gina,” the eponymous character interacts with others as these part-selves that she fidgets with, as one might interact with a dog: “That morning seems very long ago—her dachshund Henry / wriggling in her arms as you drove away, licking her lips.” Gina does not recognize the dog’s and the ex-lover’s activity as distinctly as she would if she granted them autonomous being. These concerns about how people fail to interact with each other fade in the next poems, about the dead and about the past, beginning with the elegy “Max Ritvo.” The beauty of Max Ritvo’s death, we are told, is that he made it “into a medium / of play and love— / like German,” which the living can therefore participate in and master. Beginning with “Hermit Thrush,” the poet repurposes experiences that have faded remotely into the past by, for instance, replacing a painful memory with a beautiful one or exploring the ancient past to construct a sociological theory. By contrast, the next section favors writing that honors life and present needs. This includes the need for other people, which might formerly have been satisfied by those who are lost. “Blessing for the New Year” describes a persimmon tree in which “the new buds, swelling from the same soft spots in...