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Ray Ragosta



Our Fortunes by Julie Kalendek. Providence, RI: Burning Deck Press, 2003. 56 pp., $10.

Review by Ray Ragosta


In Julie Kalendek's Our Fortunes one thing after another keeps pointing to its contrary, and the workings of the resultant, opposing forces create a tension that fills and activates the space of the book. This might seem to describe a formalist dynamic, but it is not exclusively. Kalendek's poems are anchored, as well, in the social and domestic, especially when she investigates some of the more difficult aspects of relationships between men and women, who use language not to express feelings but to conceal motives, who live together yet remain separate, and whose "enduring relationships" carry a double meaning-lasting vs. just tolerable.

Our Fortunes consists of three sequences. The first two, "Retraction" and "Make," are relatively short. The third, "Our Fortunes," covers twenty-six sections, just over half of the book. All of them are built from concise sections, one to a page, allowing plenty of open visual space, which acts as a foil to the tension-filled verbal space. By setting the two types of space against each other, Kalendek addresses the limits of the literal and descriptive powers of language as it deals with the complex forces residing in the situations she explores. As an alternative, she offers the residuals of words and signs as conveyors of extended levels of feeling. Here is the beginning of "Retraction":

The language, which grew too much inward
was supplanted by a vocabulary of custom.
The transparent gift of roses.
An ornate dance of obscure origin.
The finely hand-wrought chain.

Kalendek implies that the capacity for deep emotional expression has been lost to language and replaced by a series of "customs" that when seen against the backdrop of the next three lines, appear to be mere formalities. Even similarities of sound and sense have a way of evolving into contraries, as in the next section of "Retraction":

was it better to have a man
look up to you or down your shirt,
look down on you or up your skirt?

When Kalendek takes her investigations to the level of myth and imagery, she is no less adept at managing a clever and revealing twist. The Eden myth is translated into a rather precarious form of domestic tranquility in the sequence "Our Fortunes":

in the garden of plants unnamed

You would be on one side of the mountain
and I would be on the other

Here, Kalendek identifies Eden by the negative "unnamed," suggesting an absence of language and perhaps, a satirical jibe at Adam's slacking off.

The title "Our Fortunes" leads to another set of contrasting forces. This time the idea of fortune as destiny or wealth is reduced to words from fortune cookies, which eventually produces some difficult realizations: "I glue our fortunes to the shelf above the sink / those written in red dissolve and bleed / those printed in black seem permanent ink." In a space characterized by so many different lines of force, this neat and clear division seems out of place, but this makes the image all the more striking. Later, the image returns in a rather paradoxical desire: "I plan to read the paper fortunes / lost to weather / sunlight, water." How does one read something that has been erased? By picking up on the residuals, whether they are found in the pauses of visual space or in the tension of verbal space. Or one might look at the problem in other ways. Perhaps erasure is just as difficult to fathom as the contrary impulses that seem to haunt the speaker of the poems. Perhaps it points to her feeling of anonymity or invisibility. If one moves to the end of the book, there is still no clear answer, just "an orchard, strange / with fruit, tree by tree." This is not a place laden with fruit but "strange" and solitary, seen "tree by tree."

Our Fortunes is a book that demands and deserves the reader's constant attention, for it engages in the difficult task of questioning assumptions about how one perceives, grasps and responds to the world. In a way this is the task of philosophy, but it is here taken on by poetry, with its penchant for open-endedness. The truth poetry arrives at underscores the difficulty of the process itself: "And word can prevent nothing / hung from the framework of belief." Language and reality, like the individuals who come in contact with them, feel separate yet still must be defined in relation to each other.
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