If you always repeat repeat repeat in October. If you sometimes have to cast spells to stay earthbound, to mermaid your way back into the edges of your own body. If you’ve ever sung hold on, hold on to the wind. If you thought the wind was singing it back, and once, flailing, falling apart, took it a little—more than a little—too literally. If somehow the question of how metaphor works is also, for you, a personal question, a question of personal ontology—

What? 

Rewind, hold on, let me explain:

*

[review in-a-nutshell] [you could just read this & then buy the book…]

Maya Jewell Zeller’s Out Takes/ Glove Box is a book about how weird it is to try to live in the world. It’s also a book about memory, about nostalgia, about love and falling in and out of it, about mothering, about meaning, about metaphor, about matter, about mermaids, about rhododendrons, about class, about family, and about poetry. It takes the form of poems. Its poems are equally loud and lyric, subtle and sirening, heavy and weightless. It makes me want to memorize the whole damn thing. I don’t say I love things lightly, so you should believe me when I tell you that I loved this book. If we were having the kind of literary conversation where we try to leave the word love out of things, or even the word I, I might say something like: 

The poems in Maya Jewell Zeller’s Out Takes/ Glove Box are modern myths in which a brain’s “bright jewelry” unspools across a lifetime. Loves and landscapes are rendered in frank-yet-delicate precision as an I tries to make sense of herself and of the world she finds said self in. Zeller’s I is a myth and a fish, “folded / like a letter into its envelope,” unfolding and rearranging, deconstructing and rebuilding the vexed architecture of this “city of thorns” called Earth. She’s trying to find her way back to “her sparrow homes, her song of leaves.” If you’ve ever “looked so hard / through leaves they all become / eyes,” if your eyes really have “grown leaves in their looking,” these poems will turn your brain into a field of underwater rhododendrons irrepressibly radiating “foreign, unhinged glow.” 

Jump in. 

[the author cues a key change]

Hey. Hi, there, you. Let’s change something. Dear stranger—reader—maybe friend. I want you to try something with me. I’ve been doing that thing, a little bit, where I pretend like I’m disembodied and you’re disembodied and we’re all floating through space and time in the eternal-present of literary criticism, like everything is happening now-but-also-not-now, like it’s possible to abstract ourselves. Only I’ve been getting really unsustainably sick of the ways that I, too, do that, and I’ve been wanting to acknowledge that it isn’t fucking possible to abstract oneself. I’m a living 30-year-old human being at a desk on a rainy November morning in Beavercreek, Ohio, in the spare bedroom of her parents’ apartment. (My grandma’s bedroom, ’til she died this summer.) (My interim-bedroom, now, because I didn’t die this year the way I wanted to for most of it. Because I got extremely super lucky, dodging that, surviving myself.) (I’m a living human being uncomfortably human and personal, maybe-oversharing in parentheticals. Bear with me.) You’re a living human being reading this on some screen somewhere (where are you?) (no—really—tell me where you are) and maybe you’re like oh, cool, I’m into this right now, or maybe you’re like come on, Jo, just do the thing, shut up and tell me about the book, so, okay, anyway—

Let’s just pretend like we’re two humans on the earth. Or since we’re pretending, we could be two humans on the moon or at the bottom of the ocean. You can decide that part. Dream big. Wherever we are, I’m your endearing super-enthusiastic major-book-nerd friend who literally won’t shut up about this new collection of poetry they’re, like, seriously in love with. I’m saying Listen—

[listenlistenlistenlisten]

(No, literally, right now: please click the link and listen to Maya Jewell Zeller reading “Documentary” on Spokane Public Radio then come back to this tab. “You with me?” I’m asking like I’m the comedian standing onstage at some kind of haphazard/awesome open-mic night instead of the abstract dude speaking out of a dead dusty book because why aren’t poetry reviews more like comedy routines? How are y’all doing tonight? Are we listening yet?)

*

[the author tells the class to settle down & open up their books—or, “close reading”]

Okay. Now we have something on the table, something in common, an object of shared attention: we have a poem to talk about. Let’s talk about “Documentary.” 

People talk about poems teaching you how to read them. (A little like how humans, sometimes, if you ask them nicely, might tell you how they want to be touched, or how they want to be talked to, what their favorite band is, etcetera.) This poem actually does that. This poem tells us that we are watching someone’s “brain’s / bright jewelry, arranged / in a love scene” in which memories from different moments in a human person’s—human woman’s, I’ll go ahead and say—life. This speaking-thinking human voice tells us: “I am making a city / of petals, of rhododendrons, / places I can arrive.” 

Places I can arrive! Who doesn’t want those? I don’t know about you, but I want to hang out in this “city of petals.” Somehow this city is a field of flowers and also a rusty old car. Plus, there’s a field with a dead horse in it, which is kind of creepy and also awesome. Even more-importantly, this poem sounds really cool. Listen again to Zeller reading the words. Or, better yet, say them for yourself: 

I close its flayed stomach, 

hinged and winged

     like moths, its wet little eggs

still bobbing in their soft ponds. 

Vowels vowels vowels vowels VOWELS! Zeller’s a master of internal and slant rhyme, and in the twisty way that poems can do sometimes, sound pushes and pulls us in different directions, and in that process, meaning shifts as well—like, I find the image of a “flayed stomach” super gross, but the words sound beautiful. It spins me into a kind of tornado-watch cognitive dissonance that makes me feel excited because I don’t totally know how to react. I’m less going what? than going okay, I’m sold, please tell me more. 

Which Zeller does: “Documentary,” which opens this collection, is followed by a series of seven “out-takes from the making,” which take as their titles lines from the first poem and unspool therein. It’s a little bit like looking at a picture on a screen and then zooming in on various parts of it but when you zoom in there’s actually a secret totally-different picture that you didn’t know you were going to find until you couldn’t stop staring at it. What I love about this form is that it feels less sequential than simultaneous—when I read the out-takes, I am also rereading “Documentary” and vice-versa; it might be the closest thing to a “hypertext” I’ve ever read in a printed codex. 

I find this all to be extremely super cool. 

*

[zoom-out] [re: “let me explain…] [mid-essay time-slip prologue] 

I wanted to make an impossible alchemy happen. I wanted to read the book with my whole life. I wanted someone I couldn’t “have,” which felt like the wrong word entirely. I wanted new words for everything. I wanted to understand the world. I wanted to be able to let context into my writing without the overwhelming everythingness-uncontainability-chaos-overload of context bringing the little sentence-houses I was building crashing straight down, destructing them into nothingness, leading me towards silence (towards annihilation) instead of towards a sharper utterance. I wanted criticism? I wanted aliveness. I wanted and wanted and wanted and—

*

[the author, apparently always somehow half-naked, tries to call herself out, or maybe “in”]

If I told you that I wore a turquoise bra to write this essay because it was mermaid-colored, would I be objectifying myself by inviting you to picture it? Or am I reproducing some tired error by assuming that a woman (or a “close enough, whatever” she/they earthling) writing about her body, acknowledging it, can only ever be eroticized? Only, also, how on earth is it not erotic? The fact of my body, my body writing, my body reading? Why is everything so hard to understand? What the fuck is my real question here? If I tweeted what the fuck is my real question here at Richard Siken, would he tell me? Would he know? Definitely not. This one’s my problem. Would Alice Notley know? Maybe. Would she know that the question I’m trying to write my way into is not really about sex or even gender, but a question about being alive? Would she know, too, that these questions are actually inextricable because we’re all alive because of sexed and gendered bodies? Would she call me out for not having read enough feminist theory? No. She wouldn’t. She would absolutely not do that and even though I’m not Alice Notley nor have I ever talked to her, I know this. I know this in my whole body. I know this the way Maya Jewell Zeller knows that “Water // is the only thing that can travel faster // than a mermaid.” The way she knows that “If you consider every metaphor as being really about the vehicle, not the tenor, / you will spend a lot of time in images, / and animals, and plants, and objects, / which, really, is where you’ll find your time / best spent.” 

I haven’t read half as much metaphor theory as I’d like to, but I am going to go ahead and talk about it anyway and I’m sure some dead literary critic is rolling over in his grave but he’ll just have to live with that. 😈 Here’s how I understand this: every metaphor has a VEHICLE which is the car that’s driving the metaphor and a TENOR which is the voice in which the metaphor is making its point made. AKA, if I draw a cartoon fried egg and I say the egg is me, the EGG is the VEHICLE and the TENOR is JO. The conventional read might be that the egg is less important, the metaphor of “fried-egg-of-self” is actually saying something about JO and that’s what you’re going to write your Literary Analysis Paper about for my bullshit section of English 1001. 

How-so-fucking-ever, there is another way to look at this. Maybe the metaphor of fried-egg-of-self is not about JO, it’s about EGGS. The yolk of them, their sunshine-split, their crackable, their capacity to break and change and be made into so many different things, their how would you like your. Something, surely, about children, the body’s capacity to make them or not make them. Eggs are about potential. Eggs are about ovularity which red-squiggle tells me is not quite a word, so, oval-ness? Eggs are not a metaphor for anything, eggs are eggs. Eggs are a mysterious production of themselves. Metaphor is a mysterious production of meaning that dreams us all into a world where everything is both itself and everything else. 

Or maybe all I mean is my question is more like: 

self, other, anyone, little orb—where will you 

find your wildest, eggiest, most-wholly-precious time?

*

I want to make a whole thing happen here somehow about freedom and wildness and maybe even about woman-ing (whatever that mean), but I need you to have read Alice Notley’s poem “Backyard” to do that, so here we go: 

BACKYARD

The cat’s eye marble is green. 

One sandal. Shade. If I were a 

girl from the Sagamon River, or if

I am. I then turned to the page

called Free. The wind in my 

hair & the church in my head 

& the reticence of. No I 

haven’t been waiting. Expression

of engine of an intimate clime

It must still be love which I

talk. But you see. Shaky as

pale lavender ones. High talk to cure

an old tired fear. There’s an 

old plastic coffee cup in the

forest of the lemon tree. But 

what I mean is. White 

oleanders in sky attached to 

leaves. If you love me, all 

of nature, let the wind blow. 

[Selected Poems of Alice Notley, Talisman House, 1993, p. 99]

I like to think that Alice Notley wrote this poem in one shot in her backyard on a sunny morning. I’ll never know whether that’s what happened, and it actually also doesn’t matter. What matters is all of nature. What matters is the wind, which blows through Out Takes/ Glove Box too: in perhaps my favorite poem in this book, “Bowl of Clocks and Stones,” Zeller writes: “Friend E says you can have sex with the wind / from a phone booth on a cliff, the ocean below // rattling the receiver, the waves repeating. Maintains / you can say anything you want in a poem.” 

You can say anything you want in an old plastic coffee cup in the forest of the lemon tree. On the page called Free, you absolutely can have sex with the wind and/or ocean. All you have to do is pick up the phone. I’ve tried for years to write about that Notley poem, but really, I don’t want to say anything about it, I just want to say it. I do, over and over again, to myself and sometimes others, and sometimes when I’m out walking alone in the woods, I think to myself If you love me, all of nature, let the wind blow, and the wind picks up, and then the poem is a spell and I have cast it. Or I am a spell and the poem has cast me. Or subject and object and spell and caster and poem and nature have become inextricable, gorgeously entangled, completely disemboundaried, which is a word I just made up but want to keep. 

You can say anything, anything, anything you want. 

*

[towards a grand unified theory of mermaids]

The woman who is still a mermaid wants to write about the “woman who was a mermaid,” who is a character that shows up in one of the middle sections of Out Takes/ Glove Box, but she doesn’t quite know how, or she’s boxed herself (syntax’d herself) into this too-small suit of third-person and needs to human-legs-kick her way out now. I’ll say it plainer: this section of this book is about someone’s grappling with some seriously gnarly mental-health tangles, and these poems capture that experience so well. Maybe I’ve shown my hand already and told you that I’m writing this Conditional on the other side of some of my own gnarliest-ever mental-health tangles, but I’ll say it again. These poems floored me. (Or they dropped me straight down to the bottom of the ocean.) And they picked me up off the floor (pulled up the line) and gave me a glass of freshwater and told me everything was going to be okay, actually. And it was, is. (And, yes, of course it won’t be again, and of course it’s all more complicated than that, and of course anything any of us say about this stuff feels like an oversimplification because having a brain is fucking weird and we live on an insane capitalist planet. Duh!!! Let’s move on.)

We meet the woman who was a mermaid when she’s dreaming of loneliness in what I understand to be some kind of hospital or hospital-adjacent place where she’s sleeping in a room with roommates and trying to make sense of herself. “I had a body,” she tells us, “once that I could trust.” Ouch. “The kind of trust / that goes beyond the rain, the kind / of trust with fins.” 

I know what it is to trust one’s own fins and then forget how to trust them. Maybe you do, too. Maybe that’s what it means, on this night in this world, to be a mermaid. 

The woman goes to garden therapy, to art therapy, to history therapy: in the poem “January 9, 1493: Columbus Mistakes Manatees for Mermaids,” Zeller asks—hilariously—“What is there to love / about Christopher Columbus?” Not much is implied, but Zeller turns Columbus’s error to wisdom: “I can tell you,” she tells us, “Columbus told the truth // about one thing.” On a Dominican Republic coast, the explorer saw what he took to be mermaids swimming. A textbook might tell us those mermaids were manatees; a poet tells us, instead, how the story 

goes that my great great great

      grandmother and her sisters swam

to see the ships with pretty rumors 

for names and came back ashamed. 

      So I’ve been marked with the curse

of curiosity. It’s genetic. 

I’m kind of obsessed with this, and I think much of why is that there’s an effortless reading of the little-mermaid myth undergirding this history lesson: the mermaid story is a story about a girl wanting to know what it means to be human, what it means to love someone or to want something, and being both wrecked and saved by her own curiosity—her own wanting. (Or just plain wrecked by it, depending which version of the myth you want to ask.) This story is a story about great-great-great-great-grandmothers learning their shame from intruders. (No, it doesn’t come naturally.) The curse of curiosity could destroy us, every one. 

Or it could save us, maybe-just-maybe, if we remember which questions are really our own. If, maybe, we remember—

how to ask.  

*

[the author leaves in the detritus] 

I’ve been alternating lately between two soft long-sleeved t-shirts to sleep in: the lavender one when I need to remember how to be soft, the blue one when I need to remember how to be the sky. (I’m wearing it, that one, revising it. It’s periwinkle.) Do I sound like some Instagram girlie? Very well, I. On another “social” “media,” I was vaguely yelling the other day at some perfectly innocent old man who had posted something I found vaguely annoying about Emily Dickinson. If I could ask Emily Dickinson how to be the sky, I wouldn’t need to ask her because I already know, but I’d still want to. Sometimes I can’t do the internet at all because it murders instantaneously the way I love images, because it turns me into an attention vampire who’s also terrified of her own image, her appearance, because it turns up the volume knob on worrying what everyone thinks of you (of me) to an unbearable degree. 

What is this doing here? What are we doing here? I know, I know: It’s my essay, meaning I have to be the one to answer the question. This is terrifying. Little fish, I slip, I swim so easily and easily and easily away. 

I swim swim swim away and/but: the water comes with me. 

And/but: by the water I guess I mean—well, all of it. 

All of it: the work. The work. The whole damn world. 

*

[the author wonders] [timespell] [alarm clock]

Why do I want to say the book has healed something about my relationship to time? I don’t know, but I know writing that question that it’s true, both that the question is a real question and that the implied truth—that this book cast a spell on me that worked—is one I really believe, one I’ll swear by. Even if I can’t explain it. And/or: maybe, just maybe, because of that.

I can’t explain it, but this book’s closing poem, “Out-Take/ Storyboard,” can: 

What I mean to say is

being a mother made me feel

like a myth. What I mean is

I’m a fish. What I mean

to say is don’t open me. 

As in, I’ve always been folded

like a letter into its envelope, 

smudged pencil, a scent of old wood,

language in its dark furnace, 

something to say to someone, 

flint-ready, char cloth,

waiting to burn.

*

[further notes on mermaids by the-one-who’s-still-a-mermaid]

In order for you to really understand how hard the mermaid poems in this book hit me, you would have to have been there for my entire life. Since that is not possible for every other living human except me, please accept this montage: 

Two girls dyeing each other’s hair in someone’s bathroom in a suburban house, two girls interrupting the hair-dyeing to kiss, two girls drinking pink Rockstar energy drinks and complaining about how much they want to die, one girl having been—before they met—to the hospital for her eating disorder, the other girl wondering what that must have been like, wishing she could give her friend the way she saw her through her eyes, one girl (the artist) painting a mermaid on the back of the other girl (the writer) (the author) (yes, me)’s bathroom door in her bedroom, the girls kissing again, not kissing, kissing at stoplights in the writer-girl’s car because maybe if they’d kissed on land they wouldn’t have known what to do with all that possible, the girls fighting, not talking, one of them (the writer) has a boyfriend, she’ll feel guilty about this for years, so many years, the girls not talking, talking again, not talking, the writer always being on some level terrified—fully, irrationally terrified—that the artist will die because she’s failed to say it right: you’re in color, major color, you’re the brightest thing in the room, in any room, anywhere, no one dying, the girls growing up, we could use the word “women,” someone reaches out—there’s a pandemic—people anywhere and everwhere are dying and one of them—the writer, probably, but it’s nice she can’t even quite remember—says hi how are you what’s going on and then they’re texting and they’re sending songs back and forth and they’re spinning in different bedrooms on different sides of the country to Aimee Mann’s “Red Vines” and the writer is reading the artist H.D. on the video call and the artist sends felted plushie plants in a box to the writer’s apartment and the writer hangs them on her wall and the writer moves across the country again and the artist runs a print lab now and sometimes the writer wanders into the print lab to visit the artist and she sits there and types and feels overflowing with a gladness she can’t quite name that they’re both still alive in the room none of these mermaids are drowning everyone lives through this story everyone. Lives. Through. This. Fucking. Story. The writer eventually, for circumstances far too complicated and banal to explain, winding up in the hospital, briefly, herself. Living through it. Sketching out a cartoon fried egg with a smiling yolk with markers in art therapy and writing on it, in her own dear scrawl, fried egg of self / not quite done yet, and really fucking meaning it. Remembering how much she loves swimming. Remembering how to remember how to feel alive. 

I could say so much more about mermaids, but maybe that’s enough. 

Yes: it’s enough, enough-for-now. 

*

[the author appears to have gone missing from this section; now language itself is writing]

If you love me, all of nature. If you love the wind. If you love the square of blue that is the sky if you love the sky. If Emily Dickinson’s poem that reads to see the summer sky / is poetry / though never in a book it lie / true poems flee—feels like the deepest paradox because in it the sky does lie in books. If lie. If you’re in love with your own lies, the lie that gets called fiction. If if life is indeed true, and fiction is indeed fictitious. If you ever carried flowers across the park on a June morning that was actually every June morning, the whole idea of the weather, the idea of June. If you wished and wished and wished and wished on everything—pink stars, dandelions, misremembered novel-quotes, other people’s love letters, old photographs, rusted glove boxes, stray memories, lockets with pictures of strangers in them, the wind the wind the wind—

I then turned to the page 

called Free. 

*

[“the author” ties a knot and makes a wish on it] [tl;dr]

That Notley poem—every poem I love, really—makes me believe that the page called Free could be a possible place. Is a real one. Maya Jewell Zeller’s Out Takes/ Glove Box makes me believe that even harder. This book makes me remember how to come home to the wild, open field of my own heart. Makes me believe in sound again, in the ways that words can mean outside of meaning. When it comes to utterance, to the question of what language can do, I’m right there with Zeller, who writes—says—let’s say everything. Let’s say everything, even if we burn that saying after. Let’s get lost. Let’s get irrevocably, impossibly, utterly-vividly tangled up in the universe-sized silky-threaded iridescent spiderweb of being alive. 

Let’s say everything. Let’s never stop saying it. 

You be the mermaid. I’ll be the wind. Everyone we know can be the ocean. Everyone we love could share this wild, glowing, azure square of sky-electric blue.