Backlist Bulletin #5: The Hot Garment of Love is Insecure

Elizabeth Reddin’s The Hot Garment of Love is Insecure (UDP, 2008) and Steven Zultanski’s Bribery (UDP, 2014) are two UDP books, six years apart, with a number of similarities. Both are set in and around Brooklyn, both are longform projects rather than collections, and, most significantly, both books unfold through prose paragraphs that are broken in and between sentences:

When in a helmet you can’t resign. What happens if you resign while wearing a helmet, is that like jumping. When you run fast to the end

of the road to the gate and you can’t catch your breath, because you’ve pushed yourself like someone was after you. How is it you know how

to live. (Hot Garment)

What’s exciting about this form is what’s exciting (to me) about all poetic experiments: it allows thought to be represented in a new and potentially more accurate way. The question is, what kind of thought is best expressed through writing that was crafted with the musical instruments of poetry, but still retains some tendencies of prose? Another way of asking this question might be: what can’t be expressed within the confines of either prose or poetry?

Comedy and horror are ever-present in equal parts throughout both Bribery and Hot Garment, and the broken prose form allows these moods to coexist harmoniously. The scene in Bribery of the narrator ventriloquizing a severed head would be much more serious in the form of a lyric poem. (The same could be said of the dream-scene in Hot Garment in which the narrator is pursed through Los Angeles by a murderous monk.) Such spectacles would take on disproportionate symbolic weight in conventional forms — a scabbed and sunken head in a poem is hard to read lightly. In pure prose, these passages might become anchored to a plot or character. Instead, the line breaks allow fluidity between brutality and humor, as well as between realism and metaphor: “Eventually / I carry [the head] to the exact center of Prospect Park and start digging. There’s a good reason I’m so intent / on finding the center of things.” (Bribery, p. 9)

Another commonality between the two books is the apparent closeness between the writers and narrators. The broken prose form is well-suited to writing to which personal happenings like relationships and routines are relevant, but not necessarily centered. As in a personal essay, Reddin and Zultanski’s voices are coherent, allowing for diffuse exploration of scenes and themes connected by the threads of personality. As in a poem, the reader never develops expectations of narrative: “People have ideas about what it is to write, we listen to these ideas and then we keep writing: Dear Aunt Evelyn, I wish I felt close enough to write you a letter.” (Hot Garment) The reader doesn’t need to know anything else about Aunt Evelyn.

Broken prose also admirably mimics the flow of spoken English. The way Reddin flits between ideas and observations is reminiscent of a heady conversation with a friend, in which huge topics can be addressed without scaffolding:

I am living now, no excuses. Sometimes I know I am living, sometimes living is standing very still and watching movement, sunbeam hits a green leaf aglow or in fall the yellow gingko fans spin on the branch like love can in your heart, you try to make no sound, try not to disturb it then, hoping a perfect moment could go on and on …… that reminds me of that radio song, is it barry manilow? “on and on, you just keep on (something I can’t remember) oh, trying, even though you feel like crying, on and on, on and on, o-n and o-n”.

It should come as no surprise that Reddin’s readings around the release of Hot Garment were dramatic and confessional, distinctly opposed to the typical poetry event. On one occasion, she turned the mic on full blast and read (performed!) for 40 minutes. In the words of Filip Marinovich, “[Reddin] does not accept the knots and bows and NO-NO’S presented to us by our predecessors (and there are SO many NO-NO’S!) but goes back into herself and finds out and articulates what is at stake, what is happening deep in there.” On the page the broken prose form strains against poetry, and in performance Reddin enacted this aloud.

Broken prose is a formal tool with an informal effect. Though each break is made carefully and rhythmically, the poems retain a wild vivaciousness, their speakers as capable of sarcasm as lyric bliss. The result is writing that is at once honest and absurd, and I can’t imagine a more appropriate way of approaching what it is to be alive today than that.

— Serena Solin

The Hot Garment of Love is Insecure and Bribery are available directly through Ugly Duckling Presse (here), through our Partner Bookstores (here), and through Small Press Distribution (here). Purchases made directly through Ugly Duckling Presse on January 7 are 50% off, use discount code BROKEN at checkout.

The backlist bulletin is a column on titles from UDP’s back catalogue, curated and written by Apprentices.