Barrelhouse Reviews: One Person Holds So Much Silence, by David Greenspan

Review by Beth Weinstock

Driftwood Press / March 2022 / 65 pp

In David Greenspan’s One Person Holds So Much Silence, a migration occurs in two dimensions. Geographically, a speaker arrives in Florida from the dry lands of the west, only to find a dead-end peninsula of hot-tar roofs, convenience stores, and overdose risk, where the body, its skin “unzipped,” surrenders to the fetid inevitability of decay, accelerated by nicotine and other poisons. These poems ruminate on the body’s vulgarity (the word “vulgar” is used five times in this collection), the body’s disappointment with chemicals, the body’s hunger for something solid to anchor its disorder to the earth.

Meanwhile, in the dimension of thought—of human cognitive function—the self, unrecognizable at times to the speaker of these wrenching poems, migrates in search of survival. Even by the penultimate poem, after much questioning and stuttering, when the speaker claims “Our body has not found a destination & will be declared stateless unless claimed before [    ],” the journey of the mind continues, the date left blank, as if to say time and location have little meaning. (Similarly, two poems in the collection are titled “an incomplete history of.”)

Despite this frequent metaphysical focus, the poems return again and again to the speaker’s body and its timely disappointments. The body is often at its most vulnerable, literally stripped of all protective evolutionary adaptations (skin, teeth, fingernails, muscle). Under continuous threat, the body surrenders. Still, the brain (as much as we can disconnect “thought” from “body”) races on despite the “bloat” of Vicodin, with a limitless hunger for answers. This chasm between physical debility and the movement toward understanding is what lends the poems a fascinating precariousness, reinforced by Greenspan’s fractured syntax and stuttering line breaks—as if the body and mind cling to each other by the finest of threads. Each truncated line or unfinished sentence strains like a hopeful neurochemical within a synapse, yearning for connection.

Thus, as the body disappoints, Greenspan questions what remains of personhood. In “A Poem to Pass the Time,” he asks “…who said / I was a person    silicate & dirt / detritus of human,” and then proceeds to ask “where might I find a mannequin to practice this self / loathing?” Disembodiment, while often depicted in a tangential and confused syntax, remains a consistent and recognizable theme throughout the collection. Yet this reader craved some glimpses of authority, or neurologic insight, from the poet. In “Two: The Years, Sometimes Many and Sometimes Few, Between,” it appears. The tone shifts in this prose poem, situated mid-collection, as the speaker articulates with some authority the collective experience of mental illness. This poem, with its nod to a community of sufferers, lends a hint of hope, of survival:

We are a collective of loosely associated ventures. An arrangement of worships. We are a brand but only in the sensing of emotion. You might say we are a rhizome of commodity forms, though we discourage you from expressing in this manner. It’s called schizophrenia for a reason.

Here, the poet organizes an identity, whether it be a collective, an arrangement, or a brand. At this midpoint, the poem lands with a sense of relief, that the cognitive functions of the speaker had successfully organized and described what is undoubtedly a chaotic experience.

This relief is temporary, as the subsequent poem, quoted in entirety here, recommences the betrayal of flesh and mind:  

Three: the Dead

Unzip our skin   pick the fat
goldenrod brushed
against what comes after
organ    we gloam
below Monday   there’s rain
inside most bones
we lived with memory
we have no answers 

Devoid of punctuation and expected syntax, the poem sees no future and no past. The community the speaker had created previously, his “collective of loosely associated ventures” cannot hold. Again, the decay encroaches and the brain betrays.

In “Where are the worms in my mouth brother in your mouth,” the poet, as both questioner and questioned, asks “How are you threaded together so”; and one answer within the poem is “capillaries and caterpillars.” Both delicate, both capable of “threading,” both on a journey toward exchange of one form for another. Yet, current neuropsychiatric research documents with continued use/abuse of substances a loss of “executive function,” or the ability to plan, update information, create new memory, or adapt. This begs the question: is the poet using similar words to mimic the brain’s struggling attempts to land on the correct word, or is neurological decay implied in tangential word choice? The speaker’s mind fights in these poems to make correct assessments, and often comes up short, but as with any migration, the direction then must shift. This lends so many of the poems here an unexpectedness, often unsettling and even at times nonsensical.

What we don’t find in these poems are celebrations of the commonly agreed-upon pleasures of life: financial success, joy in relaxation or hobby, confidence in the future. All elude the speaker. Greenspan’s interests rest not in the comfort or ease of the reader, nor in the telling of a linear, reliable life experience, but rather in the uncertainty of language’s ability to convey an accurate assessment of a mortal lifespan, in all of its injuries and emptinesses. The art of the poems emerges in the reader’s recognition that we can access none of the joys of living until we have confidence in our bodily survival—meaning a confidence in air, food, shelter, and our ability to grasp time. Confidence in our abilities to think logically and sequentially about our movement through the world.

In the final poem, the body, with its “greased skin primitive throat / homely motor of exploit” gets the last word, when the poet recognizes “I’ll stand still after / the body’s inaccurate weather.”  What Greenspan provides us is, in essence, a migration, successful or not, in search of mental peace.  

Beth Weinstock is a poet and physician from Columbus, Ohio. In 2019, she completed an MFA in Poetry at Bennington Writing Seminars, and has led poetry workshops for medical students, veterans, and incarcerated individuals. Her poems are forthcoming in RHINO Poetry and Cutleaf Journal, and have been published recently in Greensboro Review, The MacGuffin, Global Poemic, Harpur Palate, Headline Poetry and Press, South Florida Poetry Journal, and High Shelf Press, as well as book reviews in Longleaf Review. She has been nominated for Best New Poets Anthology, and was a finalist for the 2021 RHINO Poetry/Founders’ Prize and the 2022 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Poetry Prize. She is currently working on her first book-length manuscript.