Review: “A Reaction to Someone Coming In”, by Wendy Lotterman.
(Futurepoem, 2023), pp. 96.

Wendy Lotterman’s debut poetry collection, A Reaction to Someone Coming In, is a shape-shifter. It is composed of prose poems in ode to pop culture, lyric poems celebrating the chaotic collage that memory makes of our pasts, and experiments in verse that make playful use of white space and indentation. How do we, the reader, react to such a shape-shifting book? At first, it is with a start, for the physical cover is a sudden flash of light. Futurepoem has packaged Lotterman’s verse in a bright yellow reminiscent of the Crayola sun in the corner of a child’s drawing.

However, Lotterman’s poems do not dwell in childhood alone. On a single page, we jump from teeange crushes to midlife crises, then back to the comfort of parental protection. This jarring cycle of rapid progression and successive regression is already announced in the halting arrangement of the title on the cover. The French flaps enjamb the titular phrase, so that the front of the book simply reads: “A Reaction to Some.” The object of this reaction is not yet clear. We must open the book to complete the thought with: “one Coming In.” The gaze settles on an individual, but the actual contours of this person and their relation to the speaker is decidedly ambiguous. The poems maintain this tension, so that, as we watch, each subject enacts a series of rapid transformations.

Lotterman’s is a poetics of reaction: to literature, gender, sex, emergency, and to the weather; a poetics of reaction to anything and everything— which is fundamentally different from a generalized poetics of observation. If observation is scientific, approaching experience with hypotheses and proclaimed objectivity; reaction unfolds from a more disordered methodology, foregrounding emotion and subjective bias.

The first poem in the collection is “In the Flowers of Young Girls in Shadow.” It borrows its title from the second volume of Proust’s septology, which is commonly translated into English as In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Lotterman’s subtle manipulation of word order here announces a different sort of intention rather than faithful interpretation. Lotterman’s poem does not take place in Proust’s late 19th century Paris, but in a “financial district” in the early 21st century United States. And yet even in this contemporary American setting, we find the Proustian subjects of “love and disgust,” “dexterity and class,” and “portraits of young girls.” Lotterman’s speaker, like Proust’s narrator, appears to be an adolescent trying to decipher what a life beyond the family home might entail: “Parental love is enormous and mistakenly cast as the foil to all future partners.” The result is a densely saturated field of budding sexuality in which no detail is too mundane for excitement. Objects like “ass” and “mouth” may make us blush, but the poem is also interested in how we react to “golf-balls,” “chicken tenders,” and “Gatorade.” Lotterman’s project is carefully attuned to both delight and unease.

The next dense prose poem in the book is “Intense Holiday.” In this description of a teenage vacation, the allusions are relentlessly attuned to pop culture and the awkwardly erotic. As “Bald Britney arrives late to the ball,” Dirty Dancing’s Baby “falls, but doesn’t fall” off a log, and “Kirsty Alley dangles from the hand of her literalized biological clock.” Throughout these poems, the physical body is often caught in an unwanted gaze, as happens in “The Flowers of Young Girls in Shadow” when “Jackie says her nipples are the smallest in a competition to which no one consented.” The result is a refractory portrait of a poetic speaker in “logarithmic zoom” like the expanding universe, a poetic speaker in fragmented stages of girlhood, adolescence, and womanhood. She is alone and yearning, or coupled and dissatisfied. “It has been so long since I had sex the way I wanted,” Lotterman writes, limning the ever-shifting line between desire and deferral: “except that yesterday I did.”

In Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism, cultural critic Anna Kornbluh diagnoses the 21st-century proclivity for the prose poem, what she calls the “prosification” of poetry, as a “genre dissolve” or, more negatively, “a thinning of the medium.” While for Kornbluh, the prose poem is a catastrophic heap indicative of a disconnected society, for Lotterman it is a storm of comprehensible feeling. Her svelte lyric is always flirting with thick prose. The line endings are ephemeral way-stations, seldom containing a sign worth stopping for. Note how lightly our reading skips over the enjambments in “Pearl”:

Something other than stories. Trial
By lyre, lying bilateral fires in a
Race-car twin-sized coincidence.
Winded by ten strokes of butterfly.
I don’t remember anything of the
Room. The event postdates the mood

Lotterman is gleefully breaking the common workshop rule of poetic composition: line endings matter, so reserve them for the significant stuff, not articles like “a” or “the.” We see a lyric on the page, but we read a prose poem aloud. The experience glitches, and classical scenes, in which gods play lyres by a divine fire, are set in contemporary rooms with race-car beds.

In the poem “Crush,” the lyric form is further put to the test. As a result of the title and the unusual convention of centering the lines, the poem first appears a bit like a page from a teenager’s diary. But as the white space and stanzaic shape begins to mutate, the feeling evolves beyond what could be supplied by a sparkly pink gel pen:

           I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter
how the mnemonic is spelled.
          The investment is temporary.
    The importance is more than historic.

In this sprawling poem, the speaker observes a force “ushering Wendy to the edge of the bed,” thus destabilizing the poetic first-person voice — which we have, wrongly or not, aligned with our poet — through the introduction of the third-person subject. In Lotterman’s poetics of reaction, personhood is a malleable and ever-expanding substance: “It’s amazing how / many acres of you can fit inside the world’s smallest, / omnipotent object.” In the flush of awkward romance, the memory of our many selves becomes, like the reflection in a house of mirrors, distorted subjects bearing little to no relation to a neat and tidy vision of a contained self.

In the final poem, “Hedera,” the book ends not on a solitary “I,” but on a dynamic vision of community. In this single page lyric poem, the reader is privy to “the scandal of a peephole”: an apt analogy for the act of spying on these intimate scenes. But this is not a one-sided voyeurism, for it all ends on a “we” in the throes of reaction: “In this weird, denuded universe, / we will pay for this disinvitation, for life.” As subjects-in-becoming, we constitute a new form of thick lyric voice: simultaneously familiar and estranging, changed by and changing the next look.