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Entering a World in The Man Suit. A Contrary review by Gregory Lawless  The poems of Zachary Schomburg’s debut collection, The Man Suit, are often surreal, fabular, cryptic, and visionary. The Man Suit is full of vertiginous and even deranged scenarios that are marshaled by the most unassuming language. Schomburg is a devout, perhaps dogmatic adherent of the declarative sentence, though his parataxis and straight-laced diction usually function to keep the wildness of his work in check—even when it feels like his poems are about to collapse or fly apart, the voice stays cool and wry, managing tumultuous content with tonal equanimity. At their best, Schomburg’s poems lead the reader on torrential sequences of association that are propelled by and terminate in discovery. Sometimes, however, the poems merely propose a few cloudy figural relationships before concluding. But, taken as a whole, the book is a success. Schomburg takes up the tradition of a few invaluable deadpan surrealists before him — Charles Simic, James Tate, and early Mark Strand — and he infuses that tradition with fresh colloquial language and a sometimes joyous, sometimes ironic delivery. The Man Suit consists mostly of prose poems, but Schomburg is most arresting when working with tautly lineated, short-lined forms. Take “Experiment in Invisibility” for example: Today I held two bananas over each of my shoulders and presented myself as a quotation. I’ve been a cry for help, mostly, sometimes a joke. When you stirred from your sleep you wanted breakfast but it was too late. I had become the urgent prayers of a desperate pilot. I had become a marriage proposal blown by a strong arctic wind across Lake Ontario. Here Schomburg’s leaps seem balanced by the space (the visual equivalent of silence) that confines the poem, and the couplets work to reinforce the contrast between the will to speak and the larger forces of the world that ultimately thwart that desire. It is an amazing piece, and it is exhilarating, too, to review the motion of this poem in summary: we begin with bananas (dragged primitively and ironically into the realm of language) and end with a dissipated marriage proposal, blown either forward or apart by the wind. This is the kind of playful heartbrokenness that keeps Schomburg’s poems from succumbing to insular fancy, which hampers the weaker poems in this collection. “The Constellation Room,” “I’m not Carlos,” and “The Town Killer,” for instance, are all crowded with mysterious and surreal events though they fail, finally, to evoke more than a sense of circular puzzlement. At times, certain figures appear and reappear without much consequence: Carlos and Marlene, who are both a little too opaque to characterize, flash in and out of Schomburg’s work without making an abiding impression. But pieces such as “Full of Knives” and “The Whale,” both prose poems broken into numbered sections, create memorable, fantastical scenarios that the reader could ponder endlessly. Here are some compelling moments from “Full of Knives”: “1. His back is full of knives. Notes are brittle around the blades… 14. His back is running out of space… 17. He is difficult to hold when he cries.” And a beautiful passage from “The Whale”: “I would have swallowed / the whole ocean / to get to the bottom of it.” I often find myself struggling to remember things, anything, from contemporary poetry. I storm through book after book without fixing onto more than a handful of moments worthy of preservation. But some of Schomburg’s work is, in the best sense, unforgettable. Perhaps, ultimately, The Man Suit is a touch too long at 105 pages, and some of the longest poems, like “Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene,” don’t have the same impact as their shorter counterparts. But Schomburg has moments, many moments, of startling beauty, even though the book sometimes commits itself too wholeheartedly to the expectedly unexpected. In large part, however, Schomburg’s poems create their own heroic version of the absurd, mixing heartbreak with surreal adventure, and giving the reader the greatest gift: a brand new world to imagine, and with which to contend. Gregory Lawless’s own debut collection, I Thought I Was New Here, will be published this year by BlazeVOX. He teaches at Suffolk University in Boston. Index of Reviews...>Reviews.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0
 

The Man Suit

Zachary Schomburg

2007, Black Ocean

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