Growler, a feature recently incorporated into the Barrelhouse site, reviews debut collections of poetry and fiction. Previous reviews can be found at www.growlerpoetry.org. If you would like to write reviews for Growler or if you are an author or publisher interested in having your first books reviewed here, please contact Dan Brady at dan (at) barrelhousemag (dot)com.

A Million in Prizes
Justin Marks
New Issues Press
Review by Dan Brady

I wanted to create the ocean, the sky
The intricate structure of a leaf

And thought by now
I’d have come close.

—from “Matter of Fact”

In his essay “The New Thing,” Stephen Burt makes the case for Justin Marks as an inheritor of George Oppen and Robert Creeley, and that Marks’s book, A Million In Prizes, is obsessed with things, objects.  Burt is trying to define a new movement in poetry and hails Joseph Massey [whose poems appear in Barrelhouse Five] as its prime executor. That, I can see. While certainly object and description play an important role in Marks’s debut, Marks seems much more interested in the personal. The objects in his poems are a means of revealing the self, the true objective of the poem. In the second-person poem “On the Making of Things” the self itself is a thing:

…You must be
And not be many things as much as possible.

Know that no one will ever love or hate you as much as you
Already do.

Part of my issue with Burt’s including Marks as a Thing Poet is that Marks’s poems and their subject are always in a state of flux. These poems are not still lifes; they are becomings. We all know the cliché of blurbage about a debut poet “emerging fully formed” from the womb of his or her MFA program/years spent writing alone/getting by. The voice is Marks’s poems is developed for sure, but it also represents a real, functioning, thinking person. To say Marks’s voice is fully formed is an injustice to what is actually happening here, which is that we the readers are getting to experience the speaker reflecting on the past, acting in the present, and evolving as we go.

I wake my not-yet-self
Projecting back on the life I rise into.

—from “Settling In”

Looking closer,
Foot paths and sometimes roads appeared
And it was a different season,
Or maybe as subtle as
A few minutes later,
The world still orbiting
The sun
Endlessly adjusting the shadows—
A little to the left; there, now up a bit.

—from “Little Happier”

“I am merely one to whom things happen” the speaker tell us in “The Detonator Always has a Red Button.”

They say that you can tell a great actor by the way that you can see him thinking on screen. This is often also true of poems as well, but when we talk about thinking in a poem we usually mean it in terms of argument or mimicry of thought processes. Marks’s poems would fall more into the latter category, but not quite. It’s more like watching someone in flux, at a crucial moment of transition between who they were and who they will be. “…As major life transactions continue to accumulate, human emotions make their presence increasingly known…” writes Marks in “Cedez Le Pasage.”

Similarly, the book distinguishes itself from other debuts in that it doesn’t seem like a first attempt. It’s all killer, no filler. The maturity of voice is evidence that Marks has been writing poems for a long time and will continue long after this collection; A Million in Prizes is a snapshot of what he’s been up to lately. In fact, maybe a week after A Million in Prizes showed up at my door, his new chapbook Voir Dire (Rope-a-Dope Press, 2009) arrived in its wake.

Voir Dire is a long poem full of reflection and self-interpretation, a tactic that is all over A Million In Prizes. In the poem “Childhood” Marks writes:

Since then, I’ve been cultivating
an ability to look back on myself
as someone other than myself. Better yet,
no one at all…

This detachment is everywhere, but I’m not sure I believe it, nor am I sure I’m supposed to. Many of these poems are a mix of Frank O’Hara and Baudelaire, as Carl Phillips notes in his judges citation—the book won the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize. They’re sensual and engaged, personal and personable, but again there is a sense of removal. This is an interior voice made exterior, a confused and painful process, as made clear in the book’s long sequence “[Summer    Insular].”

These negotiations
Between the mind and what it sees…

The mind having little else
To see           to exert its energies on

Except itself—
Regardless of what its gaze falls on—

Sees mainly itself
That is

Creates a space
It labors to fill

Voices
Sound in

—From “[Summer insular]”

For me this is Marks at his best, when he has room to move around in his poems, through bits of nostalgia, hope, heartache, fear.  It is then that we begin to see the full picture Marks is painting, one with things and selves and multitudes, hinting at something complete yet still growing, still slightly out of focus, but getting clearer.

Dan Brady is the poetry editor of Barrelhouse. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in BlazeVox, Specs, Circumference, and Post No Ills.