WHISH by Jackie Craven
Reviewed by Carla Sarettt
Jackie Craven’s inventive new collection of prose poems WHISH (Winner of the 2024 Press 53 Prize for Poetry) takes quantum time as its theme and runs with it from there. Like her prior chapbook, Cyborg Sister, these short poems crackle with deadpan humor. Think Kafka with a splash of Star Trek and a helping of Philip Dick.
WHISH starts with a quote from Einstein, taken from one of his final letters: the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn persistent illusion. Even now, few can grasp the meaning of his words. We prefer common sense. Yesterday is not today. We can’t catch the train that is leaving the station.
Not so fast. Time is something of a naughty phantom in physics. It’s paradoxical, messy, and, even worse, objects get entangled with one another. The idea that my fried eggs and yours might enjoy a secret relationship and influence one another’s future is the stuff of sci-fi, but it’s also the turf of quantum physics. Reality turns out to be weirder than any Magritte painting.
A few first lines from three different poems give the flavor of what Craven is after in this collection. The pieces in WHISH are untitled, so these are titles and first line:
HALF PAST YESTERDAY HAS ABANDONED ME.
ALONE IN HER ROOM, THE HUMAN CLOCK CHITTERS AND HUMS
Pi HUDDLES IN A CLOAKROOM beneath scarves and mittens, still damp with play.
Jackie Craven describes herself as a magical realist, but unlike some magical writers, she never sacrifices emotional stakes for imaginative scenarios. These poems are grounded in the everyday: secretaries, alarm clocks, copy machines, dreary banks, and hospital waiting rooms. They inhabit a universe of broken clocks. Times, dates and even moods acquire personality: they are, by turns, sulky, sneaky, cavalier.
Occasionally, the tone is Kafkaesque: seconds are owned by “Management,” for example: “Management has hired three new seconds, but they mangled every task.”
These moments acquire mischievous personalities: “One flutters through ceiling vents, one twiddles with the computer fans, one calibrates the world's erratic rotation and jams the copy machine.” The dreaded 8 A.M becomes melancholy and “broods beneath the gray umbrella.” In another poem, “Half Past Yesterday” has abandoned the poet, just outside of, of all places, the computer repair shop. The “delinquent” Half Past Yesterday does not bother to text or email, as it flies off to some island. Time is inconsiderate, even rude:
HALF PAST YESTERDAY HAS ABANDONED ME. I sulk in the rain-slicked plaza outside the computer repair shop and the delinquent hour doesn't come. Wind grips my umbrella; sleet stings my face. Half Past Yesterday doesn't call, email, or text. Telephone wires sag with crows too sodden to fly. The fleeting moment flies off to some island where mollusk shells lay thick as peanut brittle. Pining for Noon. Always pining for Noon. I slog through puddles, a statue learning to walk.
What is lovely here is the “pining” for a mundane slice of time. There’s nothing especially poetic about Noon. It’s not like midnight. Noon isn’t a first kiss, a lovers’ parting, or a final glimpse of Paris. Nothing much is going on outside this repair shop—just an average Noon. Still, the poet feels its loss— it’s what poets do, make elegies of moments. Half Past Yesterday has gone; she will always “pine” for it.
To prove the point, the moment of Half Past Yesterday appears again and again “giddy as a lottery.” It “sleeps in my bed and refuses to be roused.” And that statue “learning to walk” just might be Nancy Drew’s Whispering Statue, which pops up in another piece, bringing the “tell-tale clue that will lead to the missing husband and the dishonest sculptor.”(As an aside, I wonder if The Case of the Whispering Statue was every girl’s favorite Nancy Drew mystery. I too wanted to ride with Nancy “on rattling trains.”)
And through all of this, Craven offers sober hints of her life: a dead husband and a mysterious sister flit through the collection, bitter and unforgettable. We’re not meeting the ghosts of Poe or Borges; we meet father and mothers, sisters, and friends. The poet’s sister hasn’t slept “for 32 years.” In one piece about an alarm clock, the husband “snores from the far side of the galaxy.”
5:00 A.M. PINGS ON MY BEDSIDE TABLE, pings as I grope for silence, pings even as 1 swat last night's magazine against the window because I mistake 5:00 for a wasp drilling in. The magazine cannot smash 5:00 A.M., but the glass - All those shards ringing to the floor, each bright point spinning toward me while my husband snores from the far side of the galaxy.
We get clues about this (now unloved) husband’s betrayals, but we learn them surreptitiously, as if time has misted them. In one poem, at midnight, the refrigerator whirs: “Trust me. She’ll never miss the money.” Still, the sleeping husband is as “real” as 5 A.M. The poet cannot smash time (which she mistakes for an insect) anymore than she can rid herself of a husband sleeping through the alarm.
Einstein and his fellow physicists may see time as imaginary; but for the poet, time and its limits are real and cruel, as in this piece where she tries to save her sister:
My sister lies on the kitchen floor.
I pinch her nose, push air through her lips,
yet I don’t her whish out to her garden
midnight dark and flecked with fireflies.
I can never move fast enough —
Craven’s WHISK brings us full circle to the sad reality of time. We never can move fast enough, we think, to save the things or people we love. We are literally running out of time while we have too much on our hands. Our past is always catching up with us. If time is an illusion, it is our most stubborn one, as haunting as Half-Past Yesterday.
Carla Sarett is a poet and novelist based in San Francisco. She has been nominated for Best American Essays, Best of Net and the Pushcart Prize. New poetry appears or is forthcoming in Stonecoast Review, Potomac Review, Harpy Hybrid, The Nassau Review and Footnote. Carla earned her PhD from University of Pennsylvania.