Drifting Bottles by Arden Hunter
Gutslut Press, 2022
Drifting Bottles by Arden Hunter is a multimedia, hybrid chapbook that combines numerous literary forms to create a scrapbook that requires the reader to remove all rigidity from their body if they are to truly understand and experience the work. Released by Gutslut Press, Drifting Bottles has the appearance of a 90s zine but actually presents some timeless imagery and lyricism in its writing.
According to the afterword, Hunter created the chapbook primarily from a bookworm-ravaged copy of Danielle Steele’s Special Delivery and from other print sources like older issues of Newsweek and National Geographic to make a collection that plays with both the male and female form as well as with nature and how we respond to and view it.
From the start, Hunter’s collection is presented as beautifully collaged and erased images and pages of the work sourced for the book. Highlighters and permanent markers of various colors draw attention to poetic passages, but also draw the reader away from those to see what other poetic verses and lines are hidden. For instance, page 7 has an erasure poem with lines like “She / managed / her / grave / afraid,” but up on the top right corner of the page is a diagram of the layers of the earth, with a particular emphasis on the absolute center of the earth’s core, suggesting a line between these similar depths in the earth.
But what’s also interesting is to try to glimpse what is being told through Hunter’s poetry. The first act focuses on a lot of passages about a “she/her,” mainly how her emotions are buried or slowly emerging in response to various factors in her life. Even the imagery on these pages changes, starting more domestic and feminine, to becoming focused on insects and animals, before turning to destructive forces of nature and ending with the note “I won’t apologize but you can stop reading if you want to.”
Act 2 is written with a “he/his” perspective, but with writing that suggests a need for change. The images move from harder, lifeless images like machines and desolate environments to softer, more natural images like a figure planting flowers. The act ends with “imagine / seven or eight hundred / tiny white orchids / somehow without / mortality,” a deep contrast to much of the previous poetry that was more critical and deconstructive of the male figure.
Drifting Bottles is a puzzle box chapbook, and readers are sure to find joy in figuring out some of the mysteries, but the collaged and disorganized nature also shows an insight into relationships and how we respond to our environments. Readers are sure to find something others may not in Hunter’s collection, and the real challenge is to see if they can translate that to finding depth in those around them.
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Alex Carrigan (@carriganak) is an editor, poet, and critic from Virginia. He is the author of May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He is the co-editor of Please Welcome to the Stage…: A Drag Literary Anthology with House of Lobsters Literary.