Daniel Bouchard’s Razor Zigzag contains the Pleiades and the presidents, history and space. His writing traces the emotive impact of a walk home from the springs of historical discovery, asking not why we were never told things about ourselves throughout history’s recurrent nightmares, rather why do we often fail to seek that knowledge. We are trapped in a culture of our own making, our complicity with the banal and the bloodshed. Learning from Robert Duncan and Muriel Rukeyser, Razor Zigzag adds the aspect of irreverence to the faces of ongoing disaster. In this astounding collection, Bouchard charts a territory of forgotten narratives: from the lost works of early American poets, to the faded memory of the state’s victims, to the publishing ethics of outer space. This is the manifesto of a new community library: a wolf spider in the mailbox; there are bats in drive-in’s projector light; national politics as a slop of self-enrichment and corruption, and the rise of America’s secret police. This poetry lays out a curriculum for self-examination, calling for new notions of heritage, reclaimed from the right-wing, and charted through books, film, and music. The mole on the sidewalk and the June bug at the screen invite you to come along.
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Daniel Bouchard’s Razor Zigzag is a delight. The poems are intricate but welcoming, circling around history, testing the limits of our knowledge of the past, and playing a deft logical hopscotch with what they uncover: if that happened, how did we end up here? If that was possible, what awaits us now? Bouchard’s rhythms straddle the ease of everyday speech and the compressed speed of silent curiosity, so the poems shimmer from phrase to phrase and line to line. It’s a book to be savored. —Chris Nealon
Amid the roar of misinformation and distraction, Daniel Bouchard’s poems act as necessary anchor, pulling us back to stillness, focus, and the realization of how good it is to read poetry amid the 24-hour spectacle, to work the brain, to remember in shaped line buried (or being reburied) American histories like rising oil from “where the bombed ship sank at its mooring/ beside the memorial to lost lives.” Per William Carlos Williams, Bouchard “asks hard” and is honest with his answers, or when there are no answers to be had. He does not pretend or mislead. Rather, he confronts the “nothing,” the helplessness and frustration of the poet who wants to offer, generously, alternatives to the nightmare. He writes, “the software caps letters/ and I back into them/ assembling line upon bending line/ balancing gravity levity/ witness is a sandcastle after eyes depart.” This is the true rebellion of Bouchard’s powerful work: that while others may scream “everything in poetry/ is failure by default,” the poet will witness, the poem will resist. —Marcella Durand
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