Barrelhouse Reviews: Antique Densities by Jefferson Navicky
Review by Julian Mithra
Deerbrook Editions / September 2021 / 106 pp
When books aren’t melodramatically losing ground to the digital realm, they’re beckoning us inside their logical leaps and syntactic slides in Jefferson Navicky’s defiant Antique Densities. Staged in stacks, bookstores, archives, special collections, and within guest books, logbooks, notebooks, and dream diaries, an “elegant compressionist” constructs these “modern parables,” tamping fibers from historiography and surrealism into a thick, originary papyrus. To call it a collection of short stories would be too crude; to call it an experiment, too clinical. This is a collection of prose poems in which the metaphoric gains narrative heft and the narratives refract like poems.
I knew I was in for a surprise when the paratextual material did not appear as a conventional page of contents. In place of the word “Contents,” the book offers an origin story of the materials herein. “Library staff and community came together to compile a history of the library through research and remembrances.” ‘Their’/our nonfictional categories, like City Directories and Transcripts of Oral History, correspond to the sections of the book (a book of books; a compilation; a thesis) that resist conventional chronology and authorship.
Yet an even more factual-sounding and autobiographical introduction immediately contradicts this frame of verisimilitude. A single author recounts a single memory of visiting a bookstore as an origin story to vie with that of the library patrons, tracing the current book’s “parables” to those of an anthology of magical realism. I find myself continually returning to these questions of the parable-ic/“parabolic quality” of prose as I leaf through these short pieces, which contain references both obvious and elusive. Some, like Lisa Olstein and John Ashbery, exist in our shared reality. Others, like Atwood Island and Giorno Poetry Systems fundraiser, trick me into Googling (no results). Still others only suggest connections to the canon, as when I interpret “Portrait of Anna K.” as refiguring Karenina. How do these “parabolas” arc through realism, surrealism, hyperrealism, and then back again? How do my reading strategies rely on disciplinary and genre boundaries? I’m persuaded that “each reading of a text is a rewriting of it.”
Books and print culture appear in Navicky’s prose poetry as bodies, as material. Books here are often monuments in ruin, subject to the same forces of moisture and gravity as human bodies. Like in “Carsonville,” a “hard cover of Swann’s Way” languishes in the dump like old cake frosting. Both deemed garbage, both recovered. Elsewhere, the human body is asked to find new affordances, as an artist’s model finding new movement: “The girl became the artist’s paragraphs. A toe, a comma. An ampersand leading to a wrist.” Gestures follow the shape of characters, each moving effortlessly between disciplines of dance and feminist psychoanalysis, between typeface and face.
Beyond theory but not beyond parable, decontextualized, mournful objects turn over, permissive to new interpretations.
His mother dressed him in his first words. She drew them from the top shelf of a bureau and they rained down around him until he was encased in a thin stocking. He marched around the town’s cobblestones in such robes.
Here, the fleshiness of words is protective, even attention-getting. But elsewhere, words are endangered, mistreated, obsolete. In the first section, titled “Books,” I felt compelled to intervene to restore these “sun-faded spines” or the “clear plastic cover scrunch[ing] in a bad wrinkle” to their former glory, fighting against time and indifference. Like the “siege of books” who, animated as birds, rescue “The Downed Book” from its diminished analogue position, splayed on the floor in a library of screen-gazing zombies.
This reminds me of the same, natural forces of entropy at play in one of the lyrical “Special Collections.” A man with kyphosis (hunchback) intrigues the writer, a cause-and-effect detective on the prowl for a good story. The writer finally decides, “I think the earth, as some sort of revenge, is trying to pull us all down, fold us over and crush our heads into the dirt.” Navicky gives delicate attention to this vengeful earth, both its forces of destruction and the moot attempts at holding back its erasure.
Tenderness animates the tension between preservation, archiving, and death in “The Visitors Book of Atwood Island.” The account begins in the realm of the realistic, with descriptions of a cliff-dense island and a quaint hotel before veering into the fantastic. Tragically, the visitors book is actually a record of those who have committed suicide by leaping from the cliffs, euphemized as “the other life, the flying.” Somehow, the book outlives both its hotel and its signatories, though
Its binding is so loose from the years' openings that it can rest flat at any point along the spine, from page one to whatever page is the end, a point not yet reached, possibly never, in the over eighty years of use and hundreds (perhaps thousands?) of names. A dark well from where one pulls water but does not know its depth.
It twists from a catalog of vacationers into a catalog of death as it outlives those who sign it. Some texts are alive in halls of learning, yet others are endangered species vying for archival attention. Some are deemed irrelevant, while others age into antique value. Which do we preserve?
Not all is doom and mildew and dogears and silverfish in Navicky’s library. Most of his glowing gems remind us that within figurative language, dreamspeak, and associational logic are the keys to imagination and liberation. He introduces CD thieves stalked by an earnest librarian, a delightful uncle who fakes haircuts with chopsticks instead of scissors, and a failing blueberry farmer. Yet the reader is never far from the good company of conservationists, interviewers, and documenters who obsessively draw maps, weave commemorative tapestries, edit biographies, catalog color.
I will shelve this compressed volume beside collected works by Walter Benjamin, Leonora Carrington’s short fiction, and more recently, evasive forms like E.J. Colen’s What Weaponry. Faced with the task of summarizing or recounting the multitudes contained within Antique Densities, I’m thinking of aboutness, a term in information sciences. It aspires to organize a collection of disparate works into logical associations, like the Dewey decimal system. Is this writing about writing? About books, as I appreciated. About archiving liminal spaces, which consistently escape representation since “The audience no longer understands that they are part of the occasion”? In Antique Densities, I find an abundance of entry points for my readerly flights. Every page offers knots to finger, tangles to worry, and puzzles to admire.
Julian Mithra (they/them) hovers between genders and genres, border-mongering and -mongreling. An experimental archive, Unearthingly (KERNPUNKT, 2022) excavates forgotten spaces. If the Color Is Fugitive (Nomadic Press) stages an escape from frontier taxonomies. KALEIDOSCOPE (Ethel Press) flexes transembodiment against alphabetic constraints. Currently, they’re cobbling together a record of trans*masculinity in the early 19th century.