Online Feature: (Soma)tic and Micro Reviews
Michelle Taransky
Omnidawn Publishing, 2013
ISBN-10: 1890650811
ISBN-13: 978-1890650810
96 pages
http://www.omnidawn.com/products-page/poetry/sorry-was-in-the-woods-michelle-taransky/
Micro Review of Michelle Taransky’s Sorry Was In The Woods
In Michelle Taransky’s book, Sorry Was In The Woods, the audience is taken into the woods with her, where she allows the nature of the trees to speak a new language, one that questions those which destroy it.
The trees in the book breathe their natural beauty, and not the decisions of man to destroy them for security and home. The bodgers, woodcutters, and cabinet makers are made less in the work, and one can get a sense of new form/realization when entering the woods with Taransky. She lets the woods speak to her through this piece, “Sorry in the woods where I am looking for a language with a word that means we must see it all differently: the accounting for their symptoms when we are calling it a day using the wage to mark our place as the place that makes crimes build and own shelter out of arguments facing past,” here Taransky cleverly reminds us how we take advantage of the woods that have become our resource for security comfort and home; insisting we have stolen from them. Taransky is realistic in the work using her own memory of household and family, as well as the contextualized historical accounts of bodgers and woodcutters, and how this process by man destroys a natural order in nature for the sake of our comforts. She then mixes in these actual histories and accounts with her travels into the woods as they whisper their allegory to her, making for new doubled edged meanings in this experimental work. What Taransky does best in her book is capture the woods in deep contemplation between man’s nature and the nature of the woods without man. In one poem, “A Thought The Same As The Bough,” she writes,
It’s the piece of the tree growing symbolic, if you let them
Expect woodpeckers to be plastic and panicking from
Sorry, the carpenter is not a painter of the forest.
Through the book, Taransky seems fed up with the world destroying the wood, at times saying, “Sorry, I’ve went to the woods,” as though she is done listening to the plans made out by man, and at other times in the woods states she can hear the wood moaning.
(Soma)tic Review of Michelle Taransky’s Sorry Was in the Woods
The Woods Owe You Nothing
In the Seven Woods
We have a machine
We cannot explain
Why watching the event
We making all facts be one fact
To watch parents
Watch their parents
Mount a rebellion
The Surburban Shit House of Smog and Car Pollution smiled across the streets with its invisible, saying it wasn’t as noticeable to the 21st romantic children of the big building laughter, industrialized in the faces of the glint eyed innocence leaving, who jamming their top rap music of the day laughed in the Sedan over Big Spinners, Diamond ICY Watches, and other false monument & escapism along the way to a standardized idea. I
simply,
had wooden teeth put in, then grinned at you.
This was an ode to a book in the woods by Michelle Taransky. An experiment of leaving what we were taught behind and listening to the giving resourcefulness of the woods and Taransky’s thoughts within.
It’s a hell of a forest, the true insides, what one can hear that isn’t industrialized and an attachment of pure nature flourished in front of your eyes.
“You, can’t pry my wooden smile,” I said, “not in this shit hole.” The City And Things were made out for these new age children, the future who the city controlled in material, and at this early age would be dragged along the strip by their noses into a state of rotten jaded lies . It shimmers falsely across the dying sky. And so, I’m not apologizing for going to the woods again, just watching this from the hideaway, through the canopy in the trees.
A job that left them with a nice picket fence was all they need. The one surrounding a small home of orders unordered, where they the inhabitants would soon feel too controlled and want a vacation, or cut themselves, reinvent, or go to drunk, sex, loathing, prescript…
The woods talk a bigger game than you do in the city. “Want to go out for lunch?” No. I was in the woods, a real recluse on whiskey listening to the contemplation of Michelle Taransky , who said she saw something more natural, and I felt her when she made it out in paper, and the piece so moved by the whispering of the branch bark and leaves falling their own lessons through it, it can’t make the proper apologies for the nature of this bustling traffic and your ugly faces pinched. Why is that you want to paint the cabinets white? After hiding in them for three days straight, only to come out and pour a coffee that will make you nervous about Bill in the Office and Who stretches you from limb to limb in the affair of your own human emotions in the social hierarchy you’re not part of? Fuck this, I’ll be in the woods, had have you been, there, the woods, would have told you the word on : Just Where We Fucked Up and What we are made of. I guess I’m a little angry, naturally, and going to the woods. You check a mirror.
Sorry, Michelle, they can’t hear the woods from here, maybe they should go In and take your book with them?
Michelle Taransky lives in Philadelphia where she works at Kelly Writers House, is Review Editor for Jacket2, and teaches writing at University of Philadelphia and Temple University. She is co-coordinator of “Whenever We Feel Like It” a reading series and has published other books, Barn Burned, Then (Omnidawn, 2009) and is featured in the Anthology: The City Visible: Chicago Poetry For The New Century (Cracked Slab Books, 2007). Take her work into the woods and experience new ways of their words, symbol, truth, and meaning.
Reviewer: Brandon Petty is a southern writer and journalist. He is first year MFA student in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and Bombay Gin‘s Book Reviews Assistant Editor.
