It’s Raining Axolotls and Vinegarroons:

Simone Muench’s Lampblack & Ash

* Pontius Silas

The opening lines of Simone Muench’s Lampblack & Ash are its velvet rope
and curtain. “I’m like you, my dear,/ a leafleteer of belle-lettres./ A fan of
lentissimo,// doloroso.” The implied confidence between speaker and reader
in these lines—that you too are a logophile, not simply a fan of the humanities
but of literæ humaniores—will either resonate with a reader or bode warning:
‘Abandon all abridged dictionaries, ye who enter here.’ Unquestionably,
Muench has a more than friendly relationship with words (read the pretty
white dress of her poem “Pretty White Dress” as a sheet of paper for proof).
With titles like “The OED Defines Red Hot” or “The Disease of Pronouns,”
language is more than Muench’s medium, it is often her muse.
Yet while the Muse and Muench could easily be the ‘you and I’ relationship
that permeates this collection, it is certaintly not the only reading. The
presence of Language as such, from the explicit mention of vowels, asterisks,
“the elegance of the letter f,” literary terms, and other linguistic hardware
(“you/ perched like a comma in the middle/ of a sentence, circumscribed but
alive”) to the mention of poets, literary theorists, and the outright apostrophe
of Language (“Poem marry me.”), leaves no doubt that Muench intends a
layered reading of her work. As such, I would not deny, as the collection’s
anomynous book-flap blurb purports, that these poems “explore the layered
dangers of sexual love, and/or lust,” even though that particular exploration
covers a lot of well-charted ground and misrepresents, for the sake of sex
appeal, far more interesting aspects of Muench’s work. Nor would I discount
the influence of the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos (‒), whose poetry
Muench employes to partition Lampblack & Ash and after whom one of her
poems is titled. Desnos may very well be Muench’s other, her ‘you,’ the
muse that inspired this collection. However, seeing how widely the poems
of Lampblack & Ash vary in style and subject, and as all twenty-eight of
these poems have been previously published in this or that literary journal,
the Desnos epigraphs read with an air of afterthought. Are the epigraphs
beautiful? Yes. Thematically relevant to Muench’s poems? Somewhat.
Essential framework? Questionable.
As for the poems themselves, Lampblack & Ash reads as a collection of
curiosities, for as with any Wunderkammer worth its cabinet, Muench’s showcase
draws on the intricacy of nature (naturalia), human oddity (arteficialia), and the
mysterious relationship therein (scienticifa). In the vitrines of her pages, one
discovers “an architect of petals,” “a man who…barks at his car,” “a witch

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disguised as a stem of snapdragons,” “cicadas that decay into lace,” and
such an abundance of flora that I’m convinced the poet moonlights as an
amateur botanist. While the diction in these poems can be outright esoteric
(i.e. loup-garous, schizocarp, axolotl, satinspar, vermeil), it is appropriate
to Muench’s curio-program and worlds away from the indecipherable
hyperlexic wordscapes you might expect from someone employing such
vocabulary. Her genera choices are similarly arcane: bestiary, fairy tale,
herbarium, dictionary entry, malediction…Like the curiosity cabinets of
the seventeenth century, Muench’s collection is as much a testament to her
fascination as it is her humanist education. Thankfully though, her curios
are rarely opulent, drawing instead on the magic desuetude of garage sales,
prosody, regionalism, second-hand dresses by the rackful, and a diaries-of-
strangers aesthetic.

BOOK INFO
Lampblack & Ash, Simone Muench
Sarabande Books, 
Paperback,  pages
$ .
I S B N : ---

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