Gray Matter

Simultaneously restless and enchanted, the primary speaker of these poems is a tourist in the truest sense. Literally, she finds herself on trains, in the backcountry of American wilderness, in crowded European hostels, in Vietnam, eating a partially fertilized egg. All the while Michigan, the landscape of childhood, serves as reference point ("A rustic sort of place I can't back away from"). Inspired first by the Buddhist concept of anatta, or "no-self," the speaker navigating unfamiliar terrain, sparks the question of identity and the agent of its construction:

The guide/ says the self is elastic, it fogs over, twins.
We engineer a filter and backload a story.
I ask to touch the brain, maybe hold it...

As the exploration pivots inward, the poems ask how through perception the body metabolizes experience. It is from this intersection the passionate investigation of consciousness takes flight, framing the slippage between thinking and being, the feast of the subconscious and the seeds planted from waking life, the impermanence of a given moment, versus the materialism of memory, the reality of isolation despite the presents of a crowd, the influence of culture versus biology's common baseline...

The autobiographical "I" becomes the lens through which to inquire. Drawing also from contemporary neuroscience and rare case studies, the poems illuminate the peculiar, interrelated aspects of the mechanisms of the brain and personality. But also culled from dreams and memory fragments there is nothing clinical about these poems. The question of consciousness gives rise to the distinct human ability to reflect, invent. Which is what the poems--poignant, strange, radiating musicality--enact precisely:

someone gropes for the deer mount
its goofy snarl and patchwork hide
a ruse underway laughter in the pantry
the deer lifted into someone's sleep


Not the love a mile underground
on a train that slows into the station
like a sore arm bending, but the kind
boarded on a ship and sailed hard
into the storm we've made of ourselves.

Beyond what these poem say, are their deft methods of saying. The formal innovation demonstrates another kind of seeking unique to the author's sensibility and fierce appetite for language. Some poems operate as gesture, some enact conversation, others, from a suspended vantage point, narrate directly, while many track the discursive activity of the mind, performing our associative tendencies.

Sara Michas-Martin, former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University has taught creative writing and interdisciplinary studies widely, most recently for Goddard College and Stanford's Online Writers' Studio. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Believer, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Field, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, jubilat, Prairie Schooner, Threepenny Review and elsewhere. More information at saramichas-martin.com.