Do you have an unhealthy obsession? Someone who’s always on the margins. That weird game some couples play with a “hall pass.” Where they keep infidelity in the margins, I guess so there’s always a poem that might unexpectedly appear in their lives. Which is what life obsessing over someone or something is always concerned with. The unexpected, it need to be unexpectedly there when you need it most. It’s a feeling, like sitting in the living room, and suddenly fake blood is everywhere. And in this analogy fake blood is your feelings, because sitting in the living room takes up so much mental space, you don’t know. But you’re obsessing on just sitting on the couch. I want to sit on the couch with Courtney Bush watching The Sopranos, because it’s a show that lulls you into the blissful side of domestic scenery. Tony’s giant house in New Jersey. Carmella’s outfits and hairstyles. It’s all information about the lifestyle the family shares. But Tony’s combustible. He’s an engine that requires constant combustions.
I obsess over what might happen in the show, even when it’s a long scene around the kitchen counter. That’s the feeling I have reading Courtney Bush’s poems. She’s living amid the sharp potential of threat. It’s an obsession that’s not at all healthy. And it might be “obsession” isn’t the most accurate term, because I could only hear it clearly in the first third of the book. But it drew a tension that I heard through the remainder of the poems. Maybe it was an obsession that involves drinking. The poet mentions they used to drink. Maybe it was an obsession involving someone named “Katelyn.” Bush mentions many of her other friends in the Acknowledgments, explicitly thanking them for their presence in her poems. But despite many poems titled, “Katelyn,” she’s never “acknowledged.” Maybe it’s the tension with the “might” of might happen. Like the opposite of the might implicit to hope. The might happen tone in Courtney Bush is somewhere between the dread I often feel in Sandra Simonds’s poems and the tenuousness in Megan Fernandes’s work. Tense, tense, tense. And in the midst of whatever might seize up a normal person, the poet appears ready to articulate herself through it. Like not William Wordsworth with tranquility, but Courtney Bush holding a giant flapping tension in her arms. And she’s going to relate what that can feel like.
It’s absolutely true tension is an either or type situation. It’s the opening of an open-endedness, even while it feels like it’s shutting reality down. Reading an individual Bush poem involves a lot of open-ended situations. The poetic moment could turn, and it often does turn again.
She would’ve decided this to be the most predictable moment for the rest of my life, here at Andrew’s house, choosing not to wear shoes outside to sit on the bench. I heard, Looks like somebody doesn’t have shoes on. It was a choice.
Andrew operates as light from a dead star. (from “Poem After My First Revelation)
The “revelation” of this poem has happened by this part of the poem. And “most predictable moment” registered involves the poet’s participation with that revelation. When she experienced the revelation, should it be part of who she is? Or is she merely a witness to an idea that occurred to her? It’s all open-ended, even revelation. Which is supposed to mark a moment where suddenly understanding that was hidden. But the poet can’t even do this without someone telling her she’s so “predictable” in her revelation. She’s, of course, the type to go outside barefoot. Just to sit on a bench.
And, of course, there’s no knowing how “It was a choice.” is supposed to land. Is it further commentary on a self’s participation in revelation? Is the poet playing a sophisticated joke back at the “predictable moment”? Meaning, it wasn’t inevitable she would not be wearing shoes, she decided herself.
Reading Bush is benefited by this type of careful attention. Because the tension she must be experiencing is like a map of disorientation. Yes, her poems’ rhetoric propels you forward (like Simonds and Fernandes), but the pivot angling you from one consideration to the next is often subtle.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.