Kimberly Lambright’s debut collection, Ultra-Cabin, introduced a poet possessing that one thing we all—surely?—want from poetry: a genuinely original way of seeing the “nothing new.” But she also knew that a surrealism that veers too far or too quickly into the wholly other is always going to be less striking than one which remains rooted in the commonplace, contrast being everything. So, her poems presented fresh encapsulations of familiar, recognizable states, be they irrational desire (“I have an aqua eyeball / hungering out to you”), friendly praise (“Liquid elocution, what a fox”), problematic co-dependence (“Sweet pinkish neck, length / from our hooked mouth, as one, to the ground”), jealous heartbreak (“the way // you look at me during the way / you have chosen her cheekbones”) or jaded disappointment (“They always want / sigh / consent / sigh / ceremony”). She had clearly done plenty of deep thinking on the varied untapped possibilities of language, and how unpredictable diction might best be applied to secure our attentions and wonderments. Both precise and unfathomable, the resulting poems more-than-earned the book its Gertrude Stein epigram: within its pages, and leaking out, the “difference” was indeed “spreading.”
Lambright’s new, second collection, Doom Glove, includes poems in which her ostranenie-infused phrasing has become, if anything, even more dense and head-turning. From “Regular Ground”:
Heed the rag of
time, calm pool of birds
docking on the dirtworld
The three-way collision here of abstraction (“rag of / time”), natural particularity (“calm pool of birds”) and the science-fictional (“docking on the dirtworld”) is typically—and pleasingly—disjunct. She retains a thing for incisive neologisms and portmanteaus: I suspect most of us have experienced “flailure” at some point or other. I’m still not sure what an “ultra-cabin” is, exactly, and here “doom glove” is not elaborated either. The possibilities remain tantalizing. Is it a glove we put on to shield us from doom, or a glove that brings us doom if we put it on? Elsewhere, it is pure vowel-music that seems to be coordinating meaning. From “Mynd”:
In the new slow club
I’ve given my ideas
to the highlighted Nile.
A majority of the poems in the collection deal, again, with the grounded reality of relationships in specific everyday locales and domestic settings, intimacies only intensified by pandemic-induced isolation. Lambright is good at capturing the initial rush of Eros. From “Flora Cloth”:
I can’t praise your ears enough,
containing a solar system of hearing me.
You seem like the weekend.
You seem like gleaming grain.
More of the poems, however, deal with what Anne Carson would call “wrong love,” the sort of relationship recognized as toxic but hard to extricate oneself from. Often, Lambright allows blunt declarative statements to emerge from the surrounding opacity, their impact sharpened by the contrast. From “We Yelled into the Night”:
These men were boring but men will kill you.
I’ve been in a great
deal of trouble
for many years.
There is humor too, but always with an edge: the grand first line, “I thought you had an inner life but you just hate people”; the proud self-own in the collection’s opening poem: “I have created this series of misnomers for you.” All the linguistic defamiliarization works thematically too, evoking lovers’ code—those moments of shared and secret discourse—the reader reduced to interloper/bystander/onlooker. The compressed nature of Lambright’s style, squeezing more out of less, means the somewhat longer poems that anchor the collection—“Reckoning,” “You Should Be Alone with Your Thoughts in New York,” “Wide Wrongs”—feel positively novelistic in their accumulation of telling details and moments. The close of “Reckoning” could serve as a motto for the book as a whole, not courting confessional pathos exactly, but unafraid of skirting it either:
I like thinking about when you wanted me.
I like it more than anything.
The accusation could be leveled that all this is a little too insular and private, a little over-confident about the appeal and value of what can feel like a form of neosymbolist hermeticism, safely turned in on itself. Such caveats are quickly silenced by a poem like “The Times,” which ends:
Get over that, As in her first book, all Lambright’s innovations seem driven by a creative rage to expose the kernel of a specifically female experience, particularly in the face of male unreason and the ever-present possibility of male violence, through counter-destruction if necessary: “I want to wreck so much.” Long may she wreck. Doom Glove, by Kimberly Lambright. Santa Fe, New Mexico: PRROBLEM, September 2024. 80 pages. $25.00, paper. Rob Stanton is the author of Journeys (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2022) and The Method (Penned in the Margins, 2011). His critical writings have appeared in Canadian Literature, Critical Inquiry, How 2, Jacket2 and Restless Messenger. Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
said all my friends, get over his desire void of you but child,
all I wanted was cards on the picnic table at the lake,
thirty years ago, when I could slink
into an abortion clinic and wish our future away.
Heavy Feather Review 