Lip Poems by Kathy Fagan Eastern Washington University Press purchase this book from EWU Press purchase this book from Amazon.com

A book of poems titled “lip” runs the risk of starting off a bit glib for its own good. Yet, the predominant mode of Kathy Fagan’s book is not only angry talking back, not only utterance from the human organ of speech, not only voices from the edge of things, but it is all of these things. Fagan rips easily through different voices and forms and where it seems, despite occasional lapses where the language may get away from her, she is able to push playfully at language and subject while avoiding pure silliness. The poem, “Postmodern Penelope at Her Loom Pantoum” begins, Wind & warp, weight & paddle & the sea in a box on my windowsill. There’s a gull on the roof— I can hear it— A gull with a goiter gobbling up the _______. The voices continues with the same playfulness, to comment on modern culture and appreciate postmodernism and poke fun at it a bit. Penelope says, Not that I’ve seen an artery nicked except on TV. Not that I own a TV. But, in a way, I am TV. All stance & no (sub)stance. And a bit further down the form broken, abandoned she declares: “this is not a pantoum. / It may only be a shroud.” Many of the poems are untitled, except for a quote. Fagan uses quotes from a broad range of sources, from Revelations to Poe. The quotations seem to work as a sort of counterpoint to the poem. Often they are a launching point for the stance or argument of the poem. This is nothing new, as poets have used epigraphs forever, but omitting the title and leaving only the epigraph makes it feel as if the reader is entering the poem after it has already begun, a sort of eavesdropping as the poet converses with the quoted text.   Postmodern feminism pervades the themes of the text and is serious and light. One poem begins with the quote from Ovid’s The Metamorphoses “What she could do, Medea did…” here it is in its entirety. When I cut my blade was hardly red— so little blood was in him. Less spill than suck, his wound worked like a mouth, and mouth and wound alike drank what I fed him, my husband’s father, eyes fluttering like an infant’s, until I saw in them the sated look that women mistake for gratitude, and saw too, beneath my hands, a lustrous black returning to his beard, a pleasing heft to thigh and shoulder. What happened next was strictly clientele—I’d always been, as they say, in business, exchanging life for life. When Jason turned us out to wed another, it took no art of mine to kill our sons. I’d loved the magic for how it loved him. I loved the anger for how it did not. This poem seems emblematic for the book as it spills out easily as utterance, contains the voice of Medea with her violence and rage towards her husband, toys with philosophy, image, and form. Lip  is a fun book to read, full of variety and dexterity of language.

Kathy Fagan is the author of three previous collections of poetry: The Raft, winner of the National Poetry Series; MOVING & ST RAGE, winner of the 1998 Vasser Miller Prize for Poetry; and The Charm (2002). Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Colorado Review, The Laurel Review, and The New Republic, among many other publications, and has been anthologized in collections such as Poet's Choice, The Extraordinary Tide, and Writing Poems. The recipient of fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the NEA, and the Ohio Arts Council, Fagan teaches in the MFA program at The Ohio State University, where she also serves as poetry editor for The Journal.