Book Review

Autobiomythography & Gallery
by Joe Millar
Brooklyn Arts Press, 2007, $12.00
www.Brooklynartspress.com.
ISBN: XXX

In his passionate response to Jonathan Franzen ("Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing...." Harper's), Ben Marcus outlines a new writer, one who is more concerned with tricking out his reader's Wernicke’s area—a part of the brain that processes language—than delivering anyone through a nifty but necessarily diminutive story. Marcus hails "writers who have pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode," who "bend the habitual gestures around new shapes." I celebrate every time a book with Marcus' sensibilities rolls off the press.

Joe Millar's first collection of poetry, Autobiomythography & Gallery is such a book. Millar's sense of language is striking—nearly perfect, in some poems. He seems to be after what might be called "the new get"—"get" as in "I don't get it." Autobiomythography is remarkable as a response to that frustrated quandary; spending just a few minutes with the book promotes the sense that there is, in fact, something important to understand there, and you get "What Is Given" (a canny lead-off poem) really well. This is also the case, appropriately, in "What I Meant to Say." The poem seems to base itself on a fight and a flight, but what Millar means to say is, "The sea is half of it, the Other/is the other half."

These poems are heady things, and therein lies the rub. Millar aims for profundity often at the expense of lyricism, and despite his extreme efforts to join the two ("Transcendence isn't manageable;/Romanticism is hope siphoned through the cipher of a sincere plea for knowledge" from "Memory of the Body (I).") Predicting such a critique, however, Millar was clever enough to play the same trick across the fold, in "Theoria Tou Cosmou" (not italicized in the original): "I am. I am not I am. I am not iambs." Ah, that old gag.

With Autobiomythography & Gallery, Millar has learned the trick of blackening in the spaces between his words with other words so well that he has neglected the value of pause. Perhaps this is the fault of the publisher, Brooklyn Arts Press, and not Millar’s, but even the layout of the book curbs space; the otherwise resplendent “Rivers, Green & Not So” might showcase tasty morsels of visual measure—

...Two half-aware figures
eyes knuckle-cold     bundled in blue
and red flannel     gaffing a pike through one
eye large and     luminous     leviathan
some child crouches in my bones
and prods the fishy     squidish bits...

—if the poem's two columns weren't crammed onto one page, forcing those angelic blanks onto the head of a pica. The problem is indicative of Millar's heterogeneous collection as a whole, such that things get lost somewhere between the theorizing and the aesthetic venture. But the poet is a busy soul, and as a novelist, publisher, and installation artist to boot, Joe Millar seems busier than most. Autobiomythography & Gallery is a smart book with long legs, but like a first-time marathoner, Millar stretches them too far.—Adam Robinson