Determinant

Alex Fabrizio

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781606352106
• eBook ISBN: 9781612778426
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía

"These nineteen supple poems have both a strong sense of unity and a wide spectrum of forms, themes, and moods. Virtuosic writing combines with jagged feeling, and the end result is engaging, dramatic, and unpredictable."—Henri Cole

"These poems have a strong voice and a bold reach: they turn outwards, finding big subjects and solid narratives. They seek to make a world: and then they persuade the reader to live in it."—Eavan Boland

"Determinant is a strong, assured collection that begins with our planet Earth and ends with an egg. This poetic echoing of subjects and objects is indicative of Alex Fabrizio's range: these poems guide us to a vantage point from which wonder contracts and expands without a diminishing of its essence. Her speakers are calmly certain of uncertainty. Let this collection trouble what one might assume about the explanatory connotation of the title—the poems have little concern for the didacticism of cause and embrace the effects of the world on the ambiguous lyric self. They encourage a reintegration of the 'I' with that world, a 'turning returning' to it. They give the reader that gift."—Lo Kwa Mei-en

UNDARK

Radium Luminous Material. Shines in the Dark.

Undark is a combination of zinc sulfide and radium. The latter is used in such minute quantities that it is absolutely harmless.

—From an advertisement by the United States Radium Corporation

I could hardly believe the manner in which they worked. …

There is absolutely no means of destroying the substance once it enters the human body.

—Marie Curie

The dial-painter strips for the examination. She can see already that

something is wrong.

The professor stands in the corner, breathing through the thin lawn

of his sleeve.

In the windowless room, light escapes from her skin like a cry. He

takes notes

and doesn’t speak. Later, she makes her way through the dark trees

at her parents’ house, miles from the factory in Orange, New Jersey.

Hours with rough cotton washcloths, water hot as the pipes would

give, and still

she feels weight on her skin, an invisible greenish-pearl. Steam in

her lungs,

hot and heavy, like the radium wasn’t. She’s going down to the lake to

be alone,

she tells her mother, but she doesn’t. No more water. No more trying

to scrub it away. The other girls had laughed, sucking paint into

their mouths.

In dark ecstatic bedrooms, they’d gasped bright O’s, love visible as

a moon.

She’d been embarrassed at the stories. Following their voices on the breeze,

she opens her mouth as wide as it goes. She’d been quiet on the bench,

hating the loud girls, the louder laughs at her red face. She painted

more watches

than anyone—thousands of faces. She grew almost proud of the glowing

spidery numbers, pin-sharp brush. She makes her way. Through the

dark trees,

she can almost see the rows of girls. The pine needles wobble

like her left hand, painting the small nails of her right with luminous

radium paint. The needles sway like loose teeth. Her tongue

touches the steep curve of her gums, and the distant stars are all

she sees,

bright as watch paint, dolls’ eyes, the numbers on every

Washington Avenue

shop front. Everywhere, something is undark. Stars so bright

the sky

looks darker, the way the X-ray’s honeycomb of black holes

had made the white bone shine whiter. They cannot light the way

she’s gone

or where she’s going. The light comes from her fingertips. From inside

her mouth. She knows they will die first, the other girls. The ones

who’d brought home paint in their handbags, dabbed it on

underclothes.

They’d wanted it. Had she? She makes her way through the dark trees.

She’d loved the work. The beautiful dials, the money she spent

on cold milk,

ribbon for Eleanor’s hair. She could have stayed in her parents’ home,

read the story in newsprint. It’s wrong, she thinks, but she feels a kind

of pride.

Thousands of faces, all glowing like stars. She goes down to the lake to

be alone.

FARM HOUSE

1.

I said I loved the sun-hot dirt, but I r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• The Map of the World
• Aubade: Diving Bell
• The Challenger Deep
• Crew Practice, Lake Howell, Florida
• Aubade: Delivery
• Rat and Reward
• Turning, Returning
• Turning, Returning II
• Elyria, Ohio: Saints and Statues
• Gibsonton, Florida
• Decomposition: Llano, Texas
• Elegy in Zinc and Lead
• Uncle Baby
• The Invisible Mother
• Sailing Stones
• Caution Exotic Animals
• Undark
• Farm House
• Wax Resist
• Note