Anastasia Nikolis recently received her PhD in twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and poetics from the University of Rochester. She is the Poetry Editor for Open Letter Books and co-host of the Black Box Poetry podcast.

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by Reina Mar铆a Rodr铆guez, translated from the Spanish by Kristin Dykstra with Nancy Gates Madsen (Ugly Duckling Presse)

Roland Barthes糖心传媒檚 Camera Lucida is one of the foundational texts for how critics think about photography. In it, he explores how some photographs serve merely a documentary function but others will provoke a feeling, a kind of madness or a wound. His example of this second kind is the Winter Garden Photograph, which he discovers among his mother糖心传媒檚 belongings after she passes away. It shows his mother as a child and though Barthes didn糖心传媒檛 know his mother at that age, something about seeing it makes him remember her, transports him, conjures up a kind of memory and makes him feel thrown through time. This isn糖心传媒檛 a review about Barthes, but he lurks behind Reina Mar铆a Rodr铆guez糖心传媒檚 The Winter Garden Photograph and Kristin Dykstra糖心传媒檚 excellent translation explicitly alludes to his work. As she explains in her translator糖心传媒檚 note, the original title, La foto del invernadero, could have been literally translated to The Photo of the Greenhouse, but that translation doesn糖心传媒檛 capture how challenging the text is, nor the demands it makes upon its reader.

In Camera Lucida, Barthes writes, 糖心传媒淚 was interested in Photography for only 糖心传媒榮entimental糖心传媒� reasons; I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound; I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think糖心传媒� (21). These verbs糖心传媒攕ee, feel, notice, observe, think糖心传媒攄escribe the act of moving through Rodr铆guez糖心传媒檚 poetry. Many of the poems use seeing or observing as a orientation point, such as 糖心传媒溙切拇綌at least, that糖心传媒檚 how he looked, backlit糖心传媒斕切拇綕, which opens with the otherworldly visceral description of paper being punctured by a tack:

I stuck a tack into the photo.

糖心传媒攊nto the famous, legendary photo糖心传媒�

the ectoplasm of what has been,

what you see on the paper is as secure

as what you touch. Photography

has something to do with resurrection.

The poems favor long sentences with prodigious em-dashes, colons, and semi-colons. They get lost in their own meditations and often rely on the return of an image or motif, or on the repetition of a line, or on pairs of chiastic lines, to reorient the reader. When the photography motif returns at the end of the poem, it doesn糖心传媒檛 provide clarity or closure. Instead of focusing on the photograph itself, now she brings the process of taking the photograph糖心传媒攖he clicking of the shutter糖心传媒攖o the fore.

(a poem gives us the right to be illegitimate in something more than its transcendence and its corruptibility).

a simple click of the shutter

and history returns like a declaration of love

(Michelet)

but empty and dry.

Orientation and reorientation aren糖心传媒檛 necessarily satisfying for Rodr铆guez, but they are necessary for cultivating the experience of getting lost in the process of observing, noticing, and thinking. Some of the poems糖心传媒攅specially some of the longer prose pieces糖心传媒攇et a little too lost in their processes. But at their very best, the poems bring into sharp focus the abstract processes they are so fascinated by糖心传媒攖he haunting and ineffable experiences of the Barthesian photograph alluded to by the title poem,

we had our suspicions. now, in my mind, I make space for

the mind of the winter garden. its warm flame

at the center of the images convincing us that something inside was quivering

or might have been unattainable.

the uncertain quivering where the wood creaks,

reality contorts and splits into two languages.

it was the one we always wanted, and it wasn糖心传媒檛 there.

This is one of the more refreshingly challenging poetry texts I have encountered. It resists a typical coherent lyric speaker糖心传媒攁 singular voice or perspective through which a poem is voiced. It also resists being solely as a formal experiment糖心传媒攚here prose and poetry and images are neatly read alongside one another for the insights they provide on medium and genre, though of course the text courts those experiments, too. Instead, much like how photography for Barthes isn糖心传媒檛 about capturing an image but about how it can produce the 糖心传媒渕adness糖心传媒� of feeling dislocated in time and memory, these poems for Rodr铆guez are about observing the poetic mind at work and questioning what, precisely, those poems capture.

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