Pure Sensation: On Paige Lewis’ Space Struck
There has been a bit of a lull period since I finished reading Paige Lewis’ debut poetry collection Space Struck, yet still, I struggle to find words to categorize or even describe Lewis’ work. The only things that comes to mind are colour and sensation, a kind of lightness that is saturated and warm and rewarding.
This is what Space Struck feels like.
Considering poems like “St. Francis Disrobes” and “God’s Secretary, Overworked” provide a humorous and sensorial take on religion by proposing a new sort of spirituality, the above is a fitting response, as Lewis’ approach feels more honest and familiar than the colder stories in Christian tradition. The same can be said about Space Struck as a whole — it is a collection that I struggle thinking critically about because of how moving and ambient it is, demanding engagement of an emotional and even physical sort, to slip inside the bed lined “with spider plants and succulents,/ christen[ed] [the] Chapel of the Green Lord,/ and go to sleep with the sheets pulled up over [your] sticky mouth.”
Our journey through the collection in search of this kind of emotional enrichment begins with “Normal Everyday Creatures,” with a fast-paced and adrenaline-filled opening that transitions into something smoother. The poem serves as our introduction to Lewis’ astounding power as a poet, the way they masterfully transform their poems through transitions to create a constant sense of unexpectedness and delightful surprise. It is also here that we get our first glimpse at Lewis’ humour, not biting nor judgemental but from the heart, like the pleasure one gets from seeing someone belly-laugh except as the speaker tells us:
“Oh, of course your zoo will have cages!/ Otherwise you’ve just got world around you/ and who’s going to pay for that?”
Space Struck is a collection of tactile poems that are not only about presence, but also exude it. These are poems about relationality, whether among genres — poems like “No One Cares Until You’re the Last of Something,” “Magic Show,” and “So You Want to Leave Purgatory” that are a hybrid mix of fairytale and prophecy — or between the speaker and abstract concepts like religion and life more broadly, as they muse aloud in “My Dear Wolfish Dreamboat.”
“Do you think they know/ life as you know it — as an arcade/ where every good game is broken/ and no one tells you, so you waste/ token after token?”
In Space Struck, we find a speaker who is attuned to the subtleties of the world around them and is easy to sympathize with — the line “I’m/ the vice president of panic and the president is/ missing” hit very close to home. They also have a wickedly playful outlook on life and religion. The latter is frequently typically treated as something sombre and contemplative, and Lewis shatters the convention and adds modernity to the mix in “Last Night I Dreamed I Made Myself,” pointing out that “if Adam/ had the power to name everything,/ everything would be named Adam.”
There is no moral, no “neatness” to the poems in Space Struck. There is only pure sensation, with opening lines that are among the most exciting and fun that I have read in a while, transposing the advice often given to fiction writers to make the beginning of their piece a “hook” into poetry. Lewis’ poems are stories and winding streams of thoughts that flow and blend with no sense of artifice or forcefulness, only playful openness that is most evident when the speaker lets us partake in the process of myth-making with them, telling us:
“if I were God enough/ to be idolized, every statue would be a golden/ depiction of me riding a goose-drawn chariot,/ absentmindedly resting my shepherd’s scythe/ an inch away from their curved white/ throats.”
Space Struck is a collection I can only describe as existence in pure form, a warm, pulsing creation that wants to sweep you up and carry you away, a call I’d willingly surrender to once again.
