A Review of Christianne Goodwin’s and Stephen Proski’s Oracle Smoke Machine

Oracle Smoke Machine, by Christianne Goodwin and Stephen Proski. Staircase Books, 2025. 32 pages. $28.00

by Noah Robie

On the soft lilac cover, the glyph above “Oracle Smoke Machine” arrests the reader’s eye in its
seeming inscrutability: Is it a comma transfigured? a kind of speech bubble arising from the
depths like smoke? Proski’s devil horn and eye inverted, the first work and poem in the book? or
perhaps the cousin to one of the daemonic musical diacritics found on Proski’s sheet music, next
to Goodwin’s “The Clarinetist”? In some sense, the mark on the cover is all these things, and its
openness—the comma, bubble, face, diacritic not closed—articulates the openness with which
Proski and Goodwin approach their artistic process, allowing poem and artwork to play in the
same spaces, and influence each other and what the artist sees.

The notion of seeing—that is, foretelling, seeing beyond—resounds in the collection, beginning
with the title, “Oracle Smoke Machine.” Poet and artist assume prophetic personae of antiquity:
Goodwin as Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, the high priestess to Apollo, the god of the sun and
poetry—and Proski as Tiresias, the Theban prophet of Apollo, who, also blind, was transformed
from man to woman and back to man by the gods. Goodwin’s lyric prophecy shimmers with an
Apollonian “wash of gold” one finds in work from Klimt’s golden phase.1 Given such a classical
and auroral poetic propensity, one would be remiss not to mention the great poetic prophet of
English letters, John Milton, who wrote his epic, Paradise Lost, after he had become blind in his
adult years. In Milton’s own paean to sight and Holy Light, his divine inspiration for his writing
of Paradise Lost, he exclaims:

So much the rather thou, celestial Light,
Shine inward and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate. There plant eyes. All mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.2

Goodwin and Proski both act as our eyes, or plant eyes within us, and, like Milton, tell of things
invisible to mortal sight. Although the poet and artist follow Milton’s inspired practice and
philosophy, their inspiration is slightly different, inflected by Americana, Russian and Hungarian
art at large, and the mechanical-digital age.

In the beginning of the collection, in “Ophanim,” Goodwin alludes to the Biblical priest and
prophet Ezekiel and the many-eyed wheeled creatures that he sees in his visions of God, one of
the first moments in Oracle of mechanism, a potential form of the titular (smoke) machine.
Goodwin writes, “We were alone, but there are eyes everywhere, / Bursting from bark knots and
barley hulls,” selecting the pronoun we to express this plurality of perspective, and writing in the
present tense for her reaffirmation, “There are eyes everywhere.”3 She continues, “We covered
ours, and found // the way home, led by the sun-grow guardians”: Goodwin cleverly breaks the
line and stanza after “found,” emboldening the lyric with the sense that not only did they find
their way home, but that after they covered their eyes, they found, in a more spiritual revelatory
sense.4 In the accompanying lithograph, Proski superimposes a vestigial “POKOL”5—i.e., “Hell” in Hungarian, as the poet later explicates6—in the field of eyes, an artwork we find later on in the
collection, as both an oracular foreshadowing of artwork to come in “Beginner Words” and a
continuation of the devilish theme commenced in “One Night Only!” The multiplicity of eyes,
written and illustrated, becomes a multiplicity of Is, which speaks to Goodwin’s and Proski’s
artistic flexibility, “portaling [us] to paralands”—a Bulgakovian pandemonium or a quotidian
American paradise.7

We witness the absence of a fundamental in “The Clarinetist.” Goodwin describes the very end
of Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet, wherein Juliet awakes to find her love dead by her side
and decides to take her life in turn. Goodwin’s naming of the ballet as “Prokofiev’s Romeo”8
portends Juliet’s self-eradication, and torques Romeo’s verse, “But soft, what light through
yonder window breaks? / It is the East, and Juliet is the sun”9: we no longer have Juliet, the sun.
Proski articulates this absence by darkness, a grayscale sheet of music with empty staves.10
Prokofiev’s final movement, “The Death of Juliet,” appropriates many of the ecstatic youthful
themes established earlier in the ballet in “The Y oung Juliet,” and transforms it into a
melancholic dirge. The clarinetist, the agent of the problematic of the poem, misses “The
leitmotif…!,” a musical representation of the solar Juliet, Goodwin perhaps punning on the
German “leit” [to lead] and English “light.”11 It seems that only the “sleeping woman”12 notices,
“the distinct impression of something / missing, forgotten.”13 The poem ends in darkness despite
the audience’s full-throated standing ovation. It recalls Prokofiev’s East, an East with which
Goodwin herself is quite familiar, but not Juliet. But the collection does not end in darkness. On
the contrary, as Goodwin assures us in “The Techno Poem,” “We have our own horizon / of
green laser light.”14

1 Christianne Goodwin, “Sunrise,” in Oracle Smoke Machine (Cambridge, MA: Staircase Books, 2023), line 4, p. 22. All further references, of Goodwin’s poetry and Stephen Proski’s artwork, will be from Oracle Smoke Machine unless indicated otherwise.
2 John Milton, Paradise Lost (New Y ork, NY: Norton, 2021), 3.51–55.
3 “Ophanim,” line 3, p. 4. Emphasis added.
4 Ibid., lines 8–9.
5 “Ophanim” [artwork], p. 3.
6 “Beginner Words” [artwork], p. 11; “Beginner Words,” line 9, p. 12.
7 “Feychild,” line 7, p. 18.
8 “The Clarinetist,” line 2, p. 24.
9 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library), II.ii.2–3, p. 69.
10 “The Clarinetist” [artwork], p. 23.
11 “The Clarinetist,” line 24, p. 24.
12 Ibid., line 28.
13 Ibid., lines 34–35.
14 “The Techno Poem,” lines 22–23, p. 34.

Noah Robie is a writer who sometimes lives in Massachusetts and other times in Paris.

A Review of Anne Waldman’s Archivist Scissors

Archivist Scissors, by Anne Waldman. Staircase Books, 2025. 59 pages. $20.00

by Michael McGillicuddy

The Poetic Demand & The Gift of Poetry: On Anne Waldman’s Archivist Scissors

Archivist Scissors: a retrospective on the one hand, a creating on the other. Cutting up the archive and making out of it something new, which is nonetheless something old, related as it is to the archive. Older than old? Certainly—Waldman’s poetry gives us to the origin of language, wherein the materiality, the sound of the word and the meaning of the word are not yet scissioned. So the poem “Buoyant” says, “I’ll sing to the elements / in my archivist scissors.” The song addressed to the elements and of the elements, unearthed in the workings (unworkings?) of the archivist scissors. Cutting up in order to unify, disarticulating in order to articulate? A Burroughsian, a Kristevan demand. What are we to make of Waldman’s poetic gift, to what end is Waldman giving it to us—how should we be to best receive it?

The self-evident sensuous beauty of Waldman’s poetic word can’t be given by criticism, for, in taking it as my object, I have separated the meaning of the word and the materiality of the word. As soon as I describe her words with different words—different marks, sounds—I’ve subordinated material to meaning. Criticism is something of a virus, then, burrowing itself into the body of work. And suddenly Burroughs is back on the scene, brought to the fore with the evocation of the word virus—of whom Waldman described in Fast Speaking Woman as empowering her “with his uncompromising sense of the wicked power and magic of words.” Says in “Existential,” contra Burroughs,

Language is not virus if we take back
Its power, our mundane but a tool
toward sound, and beauteous telepathy

“toward sound,” and so reuniting the meaning, the use of the word (“a tool”) with its materiality. Nonetheless the “if,” the agreement with Burroughs that we are, in our everyday, subject to the “dead labor” of the word virus, doomed to reproducing “meaningful” relations for the virus, of the virus—and so reclaiming relations for ourselves, reclaiming the space of mediation, is the poetic task. Taking back the word’s power, disclosing the promise of “beauteous telepathy,” founding a radical community. Archivist Scissors is a poetic fulfillment of the task, overflowing as it is with homages, dedications, quotations, evocations to the dozens of people coming into presence with, through, as Waldman.

“And all of us ‘in relation’ to all the fabulous others,” Waldman says in the expansive “Fugue State,” a poem in which the power of language is certainly reclaimed, but for whom? Not only for Waldman, as if she, as seer-poet, stood above and beyond us, the reader (listener?)—and we know this because the poem is a fugue state, a poem in which the validity of the responsible subject isn’t merely contested but thrown aside, the poem rapidly moving from association to association, carving out relations otherwise inaccessible to the grammatically coherent “I.” “[C]ome to this Kristeva moment,” “Ponder” says, and Archivist Scissors is a collage of “Kristeva moments,” for the poems are all concerned with unearthing what Kristeva calls “the semiotic,” the generative, disruptive, rhythmic chaos out of which our everyday symbolic codes are always drawn—which is at once the disclosure of other possible manners of being oriented toward the world and toward others. Others “fabulous” not only in our good fortune of being in relation to them, but in their possibility, their as yet unrealized potential, their unreality—elsewhere described by Waldman as “all karmas we are party to.”

Language gives itself to us and, being in this relation, we must in turn give language our responsibility toward it—which is not to be found in a particular discourse touting itself as universal, but in language’s holding open (for us!) the possibility of discourse at all—which is not nothing, not an empty potentiality I attempt to indicate by pointing confusedly to my apparently thinking head, but the materiality of the word, the word meaning its materiality.

Waldman takes up a double negation in “What Is an Individual if not This Genius,” a prose poem negating prose’s tendency toward meaning, prose being the negation of the materiality of the words constituting it. Like Rimbaud, like Burroughs in his Nova Trilogy, in which Rimbaud is folded. Burroughs’ forceful, disarranged, sensuous style characteristic of his cut-ups is echoed in Waldman’s poem, but the poem—contra Burroughs, who wanted at all costs to “rub out the word,” to find a means of communication “healthier” than language—preserves language and, in that preserving, brings language back to its materiality and re-apprehends “its power,” its tendency “toward sound,” its promise of “beauteous telepathy.”

Meredith thinking with the things she loves. Languaging her hold on them. Sing
with them a Turtle’s dream. Dakini language whispered in twilight. Oracular now
time.

Ways of eyes and syllables may blaze together in genetic zone. Ritual space as
emptiness dials down. Vulnerable and climbing. Spiraling and standing still. And
take all with you. A dialogue in the antechamber. Poiesis in the culture wars.
Oneiric dreams of synergy fielding 200 billion galaxies Spaces are already sacred,
and scary, and we’ll stand by our words.

Through the poetic word’s disruption of our everyday symbolic codes, which have always already assigned to “me” an everyday sense of which my being must, and apparently always already does, reflect—the most obvious of which is: I am I, I possess the words I say and I can be held against, exchanged with the words I say—and through deploying implicit quotation and the cut-up method to speak as others (“I is another,” so Rimbaud, “I am a dissipative structure—a flowing apparent wholeness, highly organized but always in process,” so Waldman), Waldman’s work discloses a radically communal, communally radical poetic space. The work calls attention to the fact that the language I speak is never simply my own, that language always implies a relation and so is charged with instability—and is therefore not something “I” “simply” “possess.” So what does Waldman’s poetry give us in its uncovering of a space not yet subjected to the reign of the everyday? The insurrectionary depth of poetic speech.

Arriving at the limit of everyday sense—a sense indicated through the adherence to grammatical standards, the utterance sensible insofar as it maintains itself within these standards and valuable insofar as it is simultaneously a justification of and expression of these standards, part of a system and so exchangeable against any other utterance, term in that system—which is to say, transgressing everyday sense through an operation that makes it inoperative, intimating not nonsense but the possibilities of senses other than, and so beyond, the limits of the everyday. Our everyday? Banal capitalist nightmare of complicity glazed over in the name of a “social contract” from which the sensible possibilities of “human being” are drawn.

I’ll sing to the elements
                                         with my archivist scissors

                              dance on the mall in a cut-out
dakini mask

           what I own
mark the elements

as waves of emotion
          ring breath to
the country that didn’t quite go fascist

“[D]idn’t quite go fascist,” that is, that still has hope, possibility of shaking itself awake, of finding a rhythm unearthed in poetry, enjoyed in poetry. A good fortune which knows itself to be fortunate through its responsibility toward poetry’s space. Demand of responsibility. Part of Waldman’s “Core Text” reads: “We are here to benefit others and disappear.” The opening of the book’s second poem, “Burkina Faso”:

Dearest Mayra—

O big full moon. Yr grandfather—is there a photo of you with him? Friend had
sent shaman words from Burkina “prophecy” of Gaza, the layers, pooling of
blood, many generations, how hard even stand on that surface—how deep the
murders—deliberate violence—& remember Buddhist view of all karmas we are
party to … Manifold grey areas … our USA complicity, our taxes alone turn
weapons. Watched Steve McQueen’s “Occupied City,” terrifying Amsterdam,
looking so sterile. And the addresses & names, a horrible tally. You speak of vow
what’s not been defended … that’s what I am asking of people their vow (their
voice, what standing tall far different from opinion) what needs be stood up for. I
need to communicate with you, poetry thru the day waves & night waves. All the
peoples of truth and suffering.

Why the single reference to Gaza in a part of the work which shows itself outside of poetry, that is, in the form of a letter in which the meaning of language is once again privileged over its materiality—a prose which, though trembling, seeks to understand and to teach? If the first poem of the book serves to orient us, it follows the stakes of the book might be sketched out in the second. Certainly. More profoundly, it is perhaps because to enjoy in sound and meaning implies the accomplishment of a task that could be called poetry, the accomplishment of taking the language I speak and bringing it back toward that space in which it has not been subject to laceration. From this perspective, to speak of Gaza poetically would be to imply the accomplishment of reuniting the material reality of Palestinian forms of life with what might be called the “meaning of Palestine,” a relation in which Zionist oppressors have always already intervened, have appropriated as their own and for their own ends. That poetic enjoyment, then, would be for us (“our USA complicity”), but certainly not for the Palestinians. Gaza, the impossibility of its accomplishment in this poetry: inscribed within this painful separation beyond the language of pain is the task Waldman gives us. “[T]hat’s what I am asking of people their vow…” A demand reaching beyond, nevertheless nourished by, poetry.

Michael McGillicuddy is a writer living in Massachusetts. His work can be found in Arts & Letters, Harvard Review, Soundings East, and elsewhere.

A Review of Michelle Lewis’s Spare

Spare, by Michelle Lewis. Barrow Street Press, 2025. 192 pages. $20.00

by Samantha Colicchio

Zeno’s Paradox describes the way reason diverges from reality. Mathematics teaches us that to walk one mile home, a person must continually “halve the half”: first, they must walk half a mile, and then a quarter of a mile further, and an eighth of a mile further, and then one-sixteenth of a mile further. Continue to add these halved fractions, and the person can never actually reach the mile mark—they are forever approaching it. How, then, can we reconcile them finally arriving home? Is reaching their doorstep an abomination of mathematics, or a miracle?

Michelle Lewis’s breathtaking Spare, a lyric memoir set in Maine, explores fate and fortune through the lens of genetics, class, location, and privilege. Lewis is from one of the poorest towns in Maine, in a region teeming with addiction and “white trash” and a history of eugenics practices, but she lives in an A-frame with her parents and sister and a beautiful nude woman carved into the wood at the top of the stairwell: their own family symbol of fortune. She works with her friend raking blueberries so that she can buy clothes to “pass as fortunate.” Her parents own a restaurant that employs the poorer folks in their town. In a place of violence and drug abuse, she has been “spared”—but just barely. She lives on the cusp: “half of one thing and half of something else.”

What does it mean to reach that mile marker, to transcend the infinite halves and become something else, something impossible? How can we escape what we have inherited? Do we need to? Lewis quotes Robert Browning’s philosophical poem Rabbi Ben Ezra, a meditation on the rabbi’s ideas on fortune. While the book has no overt religious references, the Browning poem points to ideas of divine orchestration, of good coming out of misfortune:

What do we have here, a stillborn. My grandmother tells the story
over and over. It is the same each time: the doctor, who loved
baseball, left to catch the end of the game. When he came back, he
said, c’mon little baby c’mon. Everyone in the waiting room could
hear. By then, the brain was starved, but there was still the body.
He slapped and slapped.

At that point in the story, you might make a plea that air does not
strike the lungs. You might urge the veins not to gulch themselves
with blood. You might say, don’t take that palm of air.

And then she cried.

Lewis meditates upon the idea of “the separation”—the moment when fortunes change. Where does fortune exist? In the genes? In the brain? In the family? In the town? Is fortune a paradox, like Zeno’s? J survived her birth, and that is a miracle. Her brain was impacted by the lack of oxygen, and now J eats ravenously, lunges at others in the library, breaks the good china. Lewis describes her as “like us, with the boundaries lowered.” She tells the reader of J’s love for full-bodied skirts, and describes an image of her spinning in one, the skirt almost parallel to the floor. There is a fierce beauty in J.

Still, there are those who believe they know better than fate. Lewis writes of William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and a prominent figure in the eugenics movement, who believed that “cleansing” the population of “the feebleminded” would make for a more intelligent and desirable population. He donated his sperm to the Genius Sperm Bank “to help clean so-called polluted bloodlines.” The sperm bank was a failure and Shockley was eventually ridiculed.

Humming beneath the brutal, often grotesque landscape of the book is a quiet, profound philosophical inquiry. Through sections separated by definitions of spare, Lewis asks: what makes a life worthwhile? What is the truth? What do we inherit? Is fortune random, “the tornado that rips through, decimating one house while the next one is untouched,” or is it in the blood? If a person is “half of one thing and half of something else,” and if each child born means continually “halving the half,” how can we define a life as “fortunate” or “unfortunate”? How can we define an abomination, and how can we recognize a miracle? Lewis quotes Sherwood Anderson in the epigraph, “Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.”

Samantha Colicchio is a creative literary fiction and nonfiction writer who focuses on themes of beauty, performance, nature, mental health, and the body. Her work has been published in the Huffington Post, Faultline, The Journal, and HerStry, and is forthcoming in Off Assignment and The Rambling.