even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety by Irene Cooper

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Hold the phone.

 

I don’t mean your own. I mean that old, beige, melamine one that used to hang on the wall in the hallway, still warm from the hand that last held it; a phone smack in the middle of everything, and one that we all have to share.

 

Irene Cooper’s even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety anchors us there, its language a landline that asks Cooper’s constant and contemplative question (What’s in the middle?), introducing—or perhaps reintroducing—what it means to be held, and by whom. 

 

Sliding between that modern-day Scylla of our newfound media, the cell phone, and the Charybdis of our current political world, intent on spitting back everything it swallows, even my dreams makes good on the miracle promised in its first poem, “i don’t meditate”: 

 

            i don’t 

          meditate               am not respirated

        never run unless                  chased & i’m never

     chased & so rarely               take note of my breath

   as the miracle persists

 

Cooper’s concrete poems persist as placeholders, but ones rife with meaning. Is it an apple, with its core chewed out? Or is it an earth severing itself from itself? Thankfully, we are invited into both spaces at once, the quotidian holding hands with the direly funny: 

 

                                      thanks for bouncing

 back from all                    that freedom

    of choice                            and hubris

       pink & springy     as a fresh dime

          store sponge        ball on a brick

             stoop               catching air

 

We’re also catching onto something; Cooper, calling up her friends (reader: you are one of them), to ask if the refrigerator is running. If it is, you’d better go catch it. And if this is the apple, even my dreams offers a pathway back to that original garden, albeit one fraught with the fun found in the middle of dysfunction, as we read in “lipstick”:  

 

                        i watch a show

            in which leprosy makes

       a woman look/younger/to cook

      is to perform risk/you must know

      your shiitakes from your death cap

 

You also must know, as Cooper makes clear in “click,” the difference between the queenly and the kooky, as royal things turn rancid, or worse:

 

dreamworks

did not invent middle

school sardonicism as a

brand of humor but have reified

it, placed it on the tongues of anime

heroes & tender villains to melt

like a communion wafer

or cyanide tablet

 

We, who tend to “take kinder to a command / ment than a concept, ” as it says in “the poet posits,” will often prefer to stay out of such middle, transformative spaces. But once again, Cooper leads us back into the hallway, where a collision of opposites meet, and where the receiver can be held away from one’s ear if the conversation turns sour, or up close and cooingly personal. In even my dreams, the way forward is to hold the phone both ways, simultaneously: 

 

not even omnipotence can stop a flock

once it gets tumbling downhill sweet

jesus     what can you expect of a

people after they’ve suffered the

locusts    the plague    been

flooded with such love

 

These contagious calligrams are how even my dreams starts. How the book ends only adds to the majesty of its middle section (liminal spaces are places of transformation, whether we like it or not), and we’ll get there. But first, let’s hear from the book’s closing sequence of poems, “drift”:

 

                    what if there was yoga for rivers,

         an asana to raise the winter flow from its score

         of cubic feet per second,

                                                 gentle the summer floods

         raise all boats and restore

         the nimble reaches to their hardy oddities

 

We have found our way into postures of poetry that both reflect and carry us, as only water can, toward a restoration of our “hardy oddities.” This very human answer holds a ubiquitous question, and gently: how did I end up here?—a query often asked during the spaces and the places that hold the careening possibilities of career, of pilgrimage, of mid-life reckonings. Like Odysseus, whose return could only happen by navigating through extremes, Cooper reminds us in “4. [river critters]” that this is not a journey undertaken alone:

 

         in May the salmon fly risk the fast and heavy boulder runs

         fish only want what anybody in their position would:

                  a gravel bottom

                           calm backwaters

                                    side channels

         —& for hiding,

         deep pools

         sunk debris

 

In this place, we have guides; companions that include the bottom, the back, and the sides. A container is the thing most needed for what’s inchoate; new life requires such places of holding. What is a bird without its nest, a phone without an ear, a cat without a lap, or an infant without the arms of its parent? even my dreams starts as a subtle stream, only to build throughout the book into rapids that rush fiercely toward the truth that:

 

         the straight and narrow

         path is not for rivers

         who’ve no need of moral

         compass, they’ve got gravity.

 

In “5. [straight],” the book’s penultimate poem, Cooper’s gravity hooks her thesis like a fish reeled in, though we discover it is our own mouth that won’t let go, as we read about what has landed:

 

         the river’s neither line nor

         parabola, and balance is seldom

         symmetry. drive and cycle, water

         is oppotunivore bent

         for the sea,

         and there’s the curve again

         stable in its peculiarity

         imperiled if bereft

         of meander and bend

 

The hallway of the book, its middle space, aptly titled “attachment theory,” is where I’ll end this review. The book’s eponymous poem, “even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety” offers a stunning prelude to this center section, describing now-familiar territory: 

 

         i was scheduled for a bar shift tho i didn’t work there didn’t know it was a bar thought it was a monday night anyway not a busy

         thursday i’d been on the phone an old faded yellow phone that hung on the wall and had a spiral cord…

 

Here we realize our “curve again / stable in its peculiarity,” a cord at once umbilical as it is communicative. It is as if James Joyce himself is on the line, with no less than Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses riffing on Cooper’s cosmically connective thread:

 

         The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos.          Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.

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         (from "Proteus," the third episode of Ulysses)

 

In the first poem of this middle place, Cooper takes us similarly home, linking us back to our own flesh. “1st orgasm,” holds its text inside three rectangles (do you recall our tender need for containers?) tilting counter-clockwise as the poem progresses. The poet says “what i’m doing here / comes after / first lover / long after i learn / to fake what / i do not know—.” Omphalos, indeed. Cooper brings us back to a place from which we all hail, even if we have to fake our way there; that creative center where two entities meet with the potential to create a third. Call it birth, call it love—call it recreation (and call me a fool, if you’re not laughing a little bit at my calling it that)—the poems in this most central and compassionate space within the corpus of this book are literally held in place by quadrilateral vessels, a series of cinquains holding the absolutely ordinary in extraordinary ways.

 

It’s as if even my dreams has played telephone with us, asking now in that risible way “What did you hear?,” a message that transmogrifies through its giddy chain of listeners. The final lines in the book’s final poem, “172,” help us hear what has happened during this game to which we’ve given our attention:

 

                    the plum

                   coming out

                  like a carnival

         queen    the incremental

             heaviness of fruit

 

Cooper is our carnival queen, inviting us to hold the phone in our cell-obsessed world. even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety is a conversation about the very human containers in which we find ourselves, a fiercely, and at times very funny, poetic phone call, reminding us to listen to what it means to be human.