Abner Porzio, s[r] staff, recently wrote this review of David Dodd Lee’s The Nervous Filaments.
Lee’s explorative style caters unpredictability into a world of normative realities, while at the same time the expected, the mundane is brought out of this world by examining closer constructs of the firing obsessions transgressing inside the mind.
“You/ and the weather inside you” is one line that conducts this electrifying notion. Lee has created the collection its own spot in the realm of today’s poetry, for it’s nothing like anything else ever experienced literarily. “COLUMBIA RIVER,” my favorite poem in his collection has the line, “the world is what you can see while breathing,” the temporality constraint expressed in this line speaks inner volumes for what it means to be trapped in a body of subjectivity.
Lee’s poems captures everything and presents it in a minimal way. This collection is has uniqueness qualities, which opens this new conversation of maximal and minimal realism. Lee cohesively stacks imagery and language, offering new ways to look at structure. At times, there were moments when readings felt like looking at scenery pass through a rear view mirror.
“You stack your social/ skills on top/ multiplication tables in your daydreams.” Words dismantle, are strewn, arranged for their electrifying effects. The power of words and their weaknesses, disconnections, expose a resurgence of the poet’s abilities to control. Yet, these lines are anything but manipulative, they expose the essence of one’s power to create and deconstruct, at moments leaving nothing left but the white space, the drawing board to clutch: “I believe in words. One by one/ they dismantle everything I have faith in.”
More lines that I enjoyed:
“my stitches keep exploding into bad ideas”
“And childhood/ the barking frog who used to live under my bed”
“my little friends/ philosophy and remoras”
“tell me what you think I was thinking/ and I’ll tell you rage is the outcome of/ most reveries in Nature…”
“The absolute opposite of zero/ isn’t poetry—”
You can check out poetry from David Dodd Lee in s[r]’s Issue 10.
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