Lauren de Sá Naylor’s Gazing Down On It, published in 2022 by Ugly Duckling Presse, is strange and surreal, a dreamscape of neoliberalism and gender and COVID-19. Because this is, very much, (prose) poetry of the COVID era.
When I say that this is a dreamscape of neoliberalism, I mean both that this is a poetics of dreams in which the word “neoliberalism” gets used a lot and also that Naylor interrogates class and capital and the ways in which luxury and things and experiences interact to forge our particular era of violent, destructive capital. The piece which starts “After the performance” is throughout a strong example of this interrogation, although Naylor’s ruminations on coffee get me, I think, the most. Describing the ways in which a particular coffee is made, she writes:
You take a palm sized / pinch of grounds, knead it in your hand, open the coffee drawer, insert / the now-putty-textured matter, close the drawer and it is transformed / into intensely rich black coffee percolated into hand-thrown, wabi- / sabi ceramic cups. It’s an apex neoliberal luxury to consume in this / way. People are queuing outside to experience it. I feel unbelievably / privileged, awkward. To partake of it is to be complicit in its power.
I should note, here, that these aren’t necessarily traditional poetic line breaks: I’ve marked them as though they were, but this is very much prose poetics meeting flash essays, so do with that what you will as you look at those line breaks.
There are moments, in Gazing Down On It, when the dreamscape is more of a nightmare hell, when COVID rears its head and tension mounts, both for the dreamer and the world around her. But there is also the shared luxury of mutual pleasure, and of time with friends; lovers move across the pages here, and Naylor finds her way, even if it is sometimes muddied and hard.
Perhaps the most fascinating part of Gazing Down On It, on this first read, is that it is so clearly a poetics of the volatile, terrifying plague year of 2020, as the world was caught between dictators and lives hung in the balance of a faltering medical system. Are we much beyond that, now?
Well, not really. Which will, I’m sure, make this even more interesting to re-read, next year or the year after.
Essentially a Nerd 