A slim volume of 64 pages, Noelle Kocot’s newest collection Ascent of the Mothers volatizes the human body and blows it off into the winds of nowhere and always. If you’re familiar with Kocot’s work you already know they are a master of sifting out the right loose cluster of words to briefly summon, and scatter, the human weight of impermanence, but in Ascent of the Mothers, Kocot hones their magic of nebulized refraction to new heights of blinding clarity:
We must
lose ourselves in the indecipherable, we must
Not care that we are living, and hum to a lighter voice.
Loss or -lessness might be a good heading for the conceit of these spare, powerful poems—weightlessness, placelessness, bodilessness, completelessness, timelessness—an ongoing subtraction of the self, moored less and less by the concrete nodes of our bodily existence that pull us back to an unbending here and now, “A stubborn thing that does not diminish.” Which of course is the project of our human lives, a throwing off of physical ballast to make it to port. Anyone who has lived through the last decade will find themselves clutching their throat in a stifled cry.
Threaded with wry humdrummery and the absurd transience of our physical world—“that beige lump / Of flesh, / Boop boop booping around / Like a little ball / Of joy!”—Kocot manages to travel through the airholes of language to that particulated place in our consciousness between life and death, in and out of apprehension, of where we both are and are not a body. It is a place barely discernible and outside of anywhere, but Kocot brings us to its edge, “my shroud vanishes / In these lines.” I guess I should say that more clearly: death is here, death is everywhere in this short book—in Kocot’s own personal loss, in their mother’s decline, in the death of the discrete self—but so is the fractal, stubborn thing of life:
Soon I will no longer be
One big self, and what
Will happen to me? Let go.
Vanity is so yesteryear,
And I am not a fallen hero.
The unglazed windows,
And afterthought out of perspective,
This is what’s left,
Something difficult, a fragment.
Maybe it was the two poems of single word lines that bookend this quiet, luminous book, but upon reading it the first time, I couldn’t shake the notion of a desert and its grains of sands—not just because of the blinding vastness of the insignificant and small, but also the sense of a whole that is simultaneously many, and breaks and scatters from its own body. Which of course is the project of motherhood, a whole that simultaneously breaks and scatters from its own body, also just being alive.
In this book, the mothers are, perceivably, Kocot’s own and themself, or rather, all of our selves, the work of being a whole and multiple selves in one, watching over them, carrying them and releasing them to their own journeys. And isn’t that the work of being alive? Watching over our many selves in our bodies, “the geometry / Of us”? Carrying them and releasing them to the winds of nowhere and always, on that arbitrary date that will someday mark our physical end? Kocot writes:
We lose ourselves
In iridescence.
The one soul is a cipher,
The other,
A future flame.
Perhaps the most poignant and veracious description of both motherhood and the human condition I’ve read. The one soul—death—is a cipher; the other—life—a future flame. Or is it the other way around? Kocot leaves it open.
Ascent of the Mothers, by Noelle Kocot. Seattle, Washington: Wave Books, November 2023. 64 pages. $16.00, paper.
Elizabeth Zuba is a writer and translator. You can find books by or translated by her at Granary Books, Printed Matter, Siglio Press, Splitlevel Texts, The Song Cave, and Ugly Duckling Presse.
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Heavy Feather Review 