My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites by S. Brook Corfman
Review by Rachel Stempel.
“Each step toward or away from the door becomes impossibly detailed.”
Chosen by Cathy Park Hong for the Fordham University Press Poets Out Loud Prize, My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites by S. Brook Corfman has since been listed by the New York Times under Best New Poetry of 2020.
Hong writes in her forward, “The collection works as a conceit of diary entries” infused with “much tenderness and felt wisdom and imagination”—praise that is both generous and intangible. But perhaps there is no other way to describe the experience of reading Corfman.
I attended a virtual event hosted by the University of Pittsburgh in which Associate Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Jules Gill-Peterson and Corfman discussed the future of trans poetics and need for form innovation. Aptly titled “On Trans Lyric: A Reading and Conversation About My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites,” the event began with essential questions from Corfman, paraphrased as: What are the kinds of associative materials of your life that come together and maybe resonate with others? How can lyric be communicative and representative and remain true to our interiority?
“I wished to become a starfish collecting human hair softly in the ocean, beautiful in my slow accumulation of toxins.”
An answer may lie in the visual experience of My Daily Actions. Composed primarily of prose poems, there is a distinct lack of visual information to guide the reader. We are invited instead to traverse a path alongside these poems’ speaker ostensibly unknown to us, one wrought with the formal weight of paragraphs. Here, the prose poem forces closer investigation, and our abidance confronts us with Corfman’s uncanny ability to make magic of the mundane, to transcribe the “mind collid[ing] wth itself.”
“I am not describing my day well, but I’ not trying to escape it either.”
Approaching My Daily Actions as a kind of journal is an obvious entry point: Corfman spins an everyday object into a guiding force. Not lost in this investigation is Corfman’s critical engagement with gender identity, with the desire for upheaval synonymous with the human condition.
“I learned most of what I know about embodiment from women, and the rest from the internet.”
Herein lies the transcendent nature of My Daily Actions as alternative journaling practice: the creation of an intentional archive points to a future. The style and rhetoric of trans lyric is the materiality of community that predates any Best-Of List. The collection’s resonance, then, isn’t in Corfman’s surreal and often, sultry, command of language. It’s in the private-made-public symbiology of the speaker’s day-to-day, in the Sailor Moon references and the astrology takes, in what it means to engage with a floating narrative and how we as readers try to ground it, make private inferences from a public text. Lyric, after all, is about the audience, and Corfman gives us a generous spectacle.
“Each step toward or away from the door becomes impossibly detailed.”
Chosen by Cathy Park Hong for the Fordham University Press Poets Out Loud Prize, My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites by S. Brook Corfman has since been listed by the New York Times under Best New Poetry of 2020.
Hong writes in her forward, “The collection works as a conceit of diary entries” infused with “much tenderness and felt wisdom and imagination”—praise that is both generous and intangible. But perhaps there is no other way to describe the experience of reading Corfman.
I attended a virtual event hosted by the University of Pittsburgh in which Associate Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Jules Gill-Peterson and Corfman discussed the future of trans poetics and need for form innovation. Aptly titled “On Trans Lyric: A Reading and Conversation About My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites,” the event began with essential questions from Corfman, paraphrased as: What are the kinds of associative materials of your life that come together and maybe resonate with others? How can lyric be communicative and representative and remain true to our interiority?
“I wished to become a starfish collecting human hair softly in the ocean, beautiful in my slow accumulation of toxins.”
An answer may lie in the visual experience of My Daily Actions. Composed primarily of prose poems, there is a distinct lack of visual information to guide the reader. We are invited instead to traverse a path alongside these poems’ speaker ostensibly unknown to us, one wrought with the formal weight of paragraphs. Here, the prose poem forces closer investigation, and our abidance confronts us with Corfman’s uncanny ability to make magic of the mundane, to transcribe the “mind collid[ing] wth itself.”
“I am not describing my day well, but I’ not trying to escape it either.”
Approaching My Daily Actions as a kind of journal is an obvious entry point: Corfman spins an everyday object into a guiding force. Not lost in this investigation is Corfman’s critical engagement with gender identity, with the desire for upheaval synonymous with the human condition.
“I learned most of what I know about embodiment from women, and the rest from the internet.”
Herein lies the transcendent nature of My Daily Actions as alternative journaling practice: the creation of an intentional archive points to a future. The style and rhetoric of trans lyric is the materiality of community that predates any Best-Of List. The collection’s resonance, then, isn’t in Corfman’s surreal and often, sultry, command of language. It’s in the private-made-public symbiology of the speaker’s day-to-day, in the Sailor Moon references and the astrology takes, in what it means to engage with a floating narrative and how we as readers try to ground it, make private inferences from a public text. Lyric, after all, is about the audience, and Corfman gives us a generous spectacle.
S. Brook Corfman is the author of two poetry collections: My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites, a New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2020 chosen by Cathy Park Hong for the Fordham University Press POL Prize; and Luxury, Blue Lace, chosen by Richard Siken for the 2018 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize & hailed as an “extraordinary debut” by Publishers Weekly. Corfman is also the author of the letterpress artist book Meteorites (DoubleCross Press), the digital collection of performance pieces The Anima (GaussPDF), and the chaplet Frames (Belladonna* #256). Born and raised in Chicago, they now live in a turret in Pittsburgh.
They are a poetry editor at Pinwheel and the recipient of grants and fellowships from Lambda Literary, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council; their work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, and DIAGRAM, among other places. Recently they guest-edited a folio of performance writing for ANMLY, reviewed Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s newest book for AGNI, and won the Tupelo Quarterly Open Prose Prize, judged by Danielle Dutton. |