Crushing It by Jennifer L. Knox
Copper Canyon Press, 2020
Each time Jennifer L. Knox releases a new book, it feels like stepping in a hot tub time machine. I first read her as a sophomore in college when her debut, A Gringo Like Me, dropped. It’s not hyperbole to say her poetry changed my idea of what a poem could be. Her poems were unlike any I had read before, side-splittingly funny with pinpricks of darkness. If you can show me a more absurd/better poem than “Hot Ass Poem,” I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.
Knox remains true to her M.O. in her fifth collection, Crushing It. While this is her slimmest offering to date, don’t let that fool you. The well here is deep. “Old Women Talking About Death” begins “When did I become one of them?” and moves to a type of somber recognition: “These days when I call K, she tells me about / her friends who are dying or have died since we last spoke, / and I feel closer to her, an adult.” This poem exists in the same book as “Getting a Wax from Marisol”:
She tells me about giving herself a Brazilian
when she was nine months pregnant.
“Girl, you should be the fucking president,”
I want to say, but instead I stick with
“You did not.” “I did! I was like…”
she mimes tunneling up her butt cheeks—
“where’s the top of this thing?!”
The poems stand on their own, no problem, but in Knox’s hands, these juxtapositions of mood act as a kind of life simulation. Though some of the details in these poems might seem “unrealistic,” I would argue that they are probably too real. Take this excerpt from “The Window in the Mirror,” one of the handful of prose poems in the book:
At the table, a woman, also younger than my father, looms over two big piles of Christmas cards—her face frozen in a silent scream. The nurse explains the woman was in a car accident, and the part of her brain that managed fear got stuck on ON. […] Her fluid movement reminds me of a Japanese tea ceremony. A flimsy chain tethers her to the chair like a dog no one thinks will run away.
Knox is uncommonly adept at breaking hearts—not by means of love, but by reminding us of what it means to be alive. Yes, joy and laughing are parts of it, and Crushing It brings those moments in spades. But the book also reflects the quiet sadness that has made itself comfortable in the American consciousness (especially in 2020). Knox’s speakers tell us we’re all in the same boat, and so we have to paddle toward land when we see it: a place where “we [sing] louder, splitting into harmonies like air show jets.”
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Nate Logan is the author of Inside the Golden Days of Missing You (Magic Helicopter Press, 2019). He teaches at Franklin College and Marian University.