Paige Ackerson-Kiely. In No One’s Land. Ahsahta Press, 2007.

Review by DJ Dolack

Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s debut collection takes its title from a quote by the Finnish poet, Bertel Gripenberg, “In no one’s land, with no one will I stay,” and throughout the book we get the sense that she has resigned herself to the perspective of the northern, barren latitudes that invoke the voices of poets like Gripenberg and Tomas Transtromer, Czeslaw Milosz and early Franz Wright. On the surface it is poetry of ruin, of gauche reaction and circumstance. But there is a tenderness and intimacy to Ackerson-Kiely’s voice that for some reason we trust — even when we know it’s unkind to watch as her characters and narrators fold inward.

The opening poem, “Foreplay”, aptly begins the collection by introducing us to a place that seems superbly normal, but could change climate at any time. We are sitting uncomfortably in a motel room when Ackerson-Kiely delivers her first punch, “There are times when the absence of pride means the lion is eating his cub. The lioness under some reeds growling like an unwound basket.” From this, we know the collection is not out to comfort, nor is it likely to labor over the descriptive in order to tell the story or deliver the immediacy. This is a world of obsessive action and unsettling neglect. What feels so disconnected is the reality of the scenes; it continues, “Here is a man darning his sock. Here is a woman spitting into a sink.” Ackerson-Kiely is introducing us, welcoming us to her place, to the collection, “Here is all of Berlin in the creosote of the coughing, sitting primly at the windowsill, looking out.” Here, and throughout much of In No One’s land, Ackerson-Kiely puts the majority of emphasis on effect, while leaving little room for cause. But this doesn’t matter; our mind has already invented it. To end this poem and lead us into the first section of the book, she lands another shot to the cheek:

Any minute now someone will push his way through the door and

announce something. Dinner is served. The surgery was a great success.

I’m sorry ma’am, but you’ll have to come with me. Answer a few questions.

These are poems of gravity and some sort of omniscience. The narrator knows the boundaries, passions, and intentions of her characters as if better than they do, and has little doubt as to how the poetry will react. What’s most refreshing is that there is little abstraction and self-conscious irony in the language, but still the opportunity for the mind to fill in its share of blanks. We don’t have to learn to read these poems, but we have no choice but to react to them. Most lines are declarative and, though often neurotically considerate, the voice employed can be chastising and stark. In “Instructional Lecture for a Liquor Store Clerk,” Ackerson-Kiely brings across the immediacy of not only the poem, but of the entire collection:

The customers want something from you that you do not own but

in fact lord over. Let the older men call you baby or hon, it relaxes

them. See how they tremble, hands like a wet fawn one hour old

pushing up to stand. It will be a hard winter and the fawn won’t

make it. Mostly it is bleak.

It’s this sense of awareness she holds over the poems that keeps us willing to find out and discover. What else does she know? The poems seem to understand too well their surroundings and apologize for that fact only by exploring some more. It’s as if they are telling the reader, See? It’s not that bad. We all do it; it happens to everyone. The odd stability on the part of the narrator, even when the circumstances should elicit trepidation or some morose eeriness, is compulsive and pure. To end the poem “Illness”, Paige writes:

Snow

falling and melting

on a dumpster out back

really

shining in the moonlight.

People who say, at least

I have my health.

Other people nodding.

There are strong elements of early Franz Wright in both the images and line breaks in this poem, especially when we look at her tendency to mix mood and action, nature and oddity in order to confront the silence of the situation. We are particularly reminded of the ending of Wright’s “Elegy: Breece D’J Pancake”:

summer thunder

from a cloudless sky . . .

The abandoned abandon.

There are no adults.

You’re dead

but look who’s talking.

In both of these passages, we get the sense of time crawling, and the narrator right there among the characters of the poem. How else could we get such images? Note Ackerson-Kiely’s “snow/falling and melting” to Wright’s “summer thunder” image, as well as her enjambed “really” giving her total control over pacing, one of Wright’s specialties. Both of these poems also end with a solemn reflection on the part of the speaker, as if the camera has panned slowly inward for the conversation, and though Wright closes with a beautifully comic, terribly askew comment on the crowd, Ackerson-Kiely’s fade-out is more unsettling, more uniquely dark and personally affronting. We are there with her, sitting at the bar, afraid to say the wrong thing, to make the inconsiderate movement. And Paige lets us know she is watching. The tone is again serious but tinged with anxiety. We ask ourselves why the person is saying this to the crowd; yet more importantly, we ask ourselves why the others are nodding. Perhaps they cannot make the statement they have just heard (can we?). But why. If Ackerson-Kiely knows, she’s not telling us.

Though Ackerson-Kiely’s acute sense of pause and rhythm pushes most of these poems with sharp line breaks, the prose poems placed regularly throughout the book show us that some were just meant to be told as bedtime stories for the disavowed. She brings “Onenightstand” to a conclusion writing, “Do it not for the deer with their eyes like the bedrooms of unrented apartments. Tell me how you set out the salt-lick when you were a boy. Tell me how they approached your hand, which you pretended held food, but was merely a closed fist.”

Something should also be said of the sensuality running through many of the poems. Though Ackerson-Kiely’s voice carries a strength and self-assuredness, it is also the victim of physical desire and aspiration. There is both a need to be loved, and loving as a way to feel needed. But what resounds most is the anxiety she employs when faced with the circumstances. In “Silent Night”, she quips about an uncomfortable situation between could-be lovers:

I am talking around the fact that you aren’t supposed to be here, in flesh

or in my capacity to imagine my flesh as yours --- touching me the way you

would pull back the smallest bit of wick from a kerosene lantern. Make it

fucking darker.

The mood here is mostly manic and unrestrained, and the focus of the speaker is on the act of love and physicality of sex rather than the passion and emotion that runs along side. There is a coldness in the voice and a selfish (yet understandable) want. The narrator gives in, but reluctantly. However, it seems the other character wants more, and has even plead a case, though the speaker wants nothing of it, “…& after touching me the world would end not with flood or fire or people throwing themselves out of buildings… The whole world & I might then sleep, sleep in heavenly peace.” This sentiment is recurrent throughout the book and gives us another window through which we can understand its motivations. Lines like “I locked up all / of the beautiful things / that might move me.” (“The Potential of Rapture”) and “I don’t want to be held / up by anything.” (“Elegy for Guizhou”) remind us of the battle between constantly needing to be free from others, yet at the same time the reality of being attached and guided through life with little sense of self-sufficiency.

This is not to say that tenderness does not circulate within the poems, but it’s there hidden between moments of fixation and control:

We kiss permanently although it feels sudden, jet-streamed, and

constantly I am reminded of my tiny gun that grows damp under

the weight of my hand. We kiss under the damp weight of my hand.

Again it’s as if the speaker’s passion is misdirected, and we know it’s due to distrust. This quick scene, seemingly out of a pulp novel, shows us the book’s besotted skepticism of nature, marriage, relationships, and death. The speaker is constantly at arms, constantly looking for clues in order to maintain control of all situations. The reason this works throughout the book is because we can so closely admire and relate to the necessity for understanding, for organization and power over our lives — especially when we see our skies cloud with relentless responsibility and dependence.

In No One’s Land is split into five sections, with a single poems book ending the collection. Though there is no obvious need for the divisions, they give us pause when it feels most appropriate, in order to perhaps go back and reflect upon what Ackerson-Kiely has given thus far. In her comments about the book and writing in general, as taken from the Ahsahta Press webpage, Ackerson-Kiely writes of her work as being connected to “that wait, that laborious and lonely wait one waits until the very last finger releases the side of the cliff, and one is free, completely and finally free of the cliff.” In this collection, it’s fairly obvious that the poems themselves are concerned with not only the interval between clutch and dismount, but also the grounds and rationale for her dangling in the first place. She is planning a fall on her own terms, taking stock of her surroundings and making distinctions— who else is hanging and how loosely, how cold is the wind pushing against the neck, and what will survive without her.