Barrelhouse Reviews: Stranger by Emily Hunt

Reviewed by Patrick Carr

The Song Cave / March 2024 / 116 pp

In trying to describe the experience of reading Emily Hunt’s poems, I tend to reach for metaphors from chemistry. Her poems are like photosensitive paper that reveal patterns and arrays of energy. Or her poems must have crystallized from a fluid state that persists far away somewhere off the page. In any case, Hunt’s poems are the result of intricate processes of experience and observation. In Stranger, a personal document written over ten years, a life takes shape. Hunt marks the strangeness of that process at different scales, from the personal and intimate to the large and collective. Implicit in Hunt’s collection is that poetry is specially suited to register this strangeness, and that lending imagination to it is both an ethical and aesthetic good. In lending one’s imagination to Stranger, the reader discovers a tour-de-force of feeling mobilized by Hunt’s fearless attention and expression.

Stranger reveals the circulating energies that animate the everyday. In the book’s first section, dominated by the long poem “Company,” Hunt draws on her experience working for a flower delivery startup in San Francisco to model flows of affect and money through the city. The speaker’s job positions her at the center of the exchange of flowers, messages, labor, and payment, all of which come haltingly, with bad blooms, late payroll, illicit breaks, and awkward phrasing. The speaker describes herself transcribing customers’ short messages, entered via app, onto paper cards, and with her we witness the city’s affective flows at their oddest and most touching: 

One says I love you and is signed Best, 
A few are written to semi-famous people. 
There is often not enough room
on the pre-creased paper card  
for all the customer has to say.
It is odd to read 
brief sentences and phrases 
addressed to the loved ones 
of the sick or recently dead
and to Ashton Kutcher 
alone in the van
with a view of the water,
to read and then write
good luck, you rock,
see you tonight!  

What luck to have a poet transcribe your well wishes—twice! Witnessing these gestures and disclosures—or, rather, listening as the speaker contends with their partial expression and absurdity (Ashton Kutcher?) is charming and delightful. So is imagining  a whole city communicating with itself this way, with ever greater demand for the speaker’s services. Hunt invokes Whitman to give voice to this sentiment in "Warehouse," which imagines the city’s affection and demand for flowers intensifying at the dizzying rate of a startup’s projected growth: "We would keep up, / and people would begin to want more. / I might be one of them, working for you." Hunt allows our collective life to feel wonderfully expansive in its strangeness. "Stranger," a more intimate evocation, is the final poem of the book's opening section, and it's about caring for an infant, "the baby," who knocks the speaker off-kilter. "I consider calling someone familiar / as the baby looks up at me," Hunt writes. Intimacy doesn't ward off strangeness, but introduces it at a different scale. 

 “Emily,” which begins the collection’s second part, is culled from language Hunt found searching for romance on Tinder. For the first time, Hunt positions the speaker as an addressee on the receiving end of various affective charges. “Can I sleep with you? / It would really help,” pleads one prospective suitor. “I felt endeared, repulsed, / and bemused / viewing your photos,” remarks another. Witnessing these entreaties is endearing, repulsive, and bemusing, because what Hunt reveals more or less directly is the strangeness—the agonies, compulsions, and dis-ease—of other people, and the way their agonies and compulsions are other to themselves, propelling them. To me, the sensibility here verges on Lynchian. Drama in Lynch often comes from competing degrees of composure—the whole gamut, from a detective glancing into a paper bag and remarking placidly, “That’s a human ear, all right” to a deranged Frank Booth shouting “Anyone want to go on a joyride with us??!” As in a Lynch film, the human in Stranger often appears as a puppet and a conduit for different codes and energies. 

Maybe the most moving use of language that captures overpowering affect comes in “Stuart’s Sentences,” which is compiled from emails, essays, and stories by Hunt’s brother Stuart, who died by suicide in 2019. We witness the agonies that led him to suicide as he apparently articulated them himself. 

Being alive is a good thing. 
But I don’t feel alive.
Sometimes I feel dead.
I go and walk the street.
Sometimes I think I’ve lived 
a long succession of lives on this planet
and that I am not young anymore
and it is good to think sometimes
I might be someplace better
in my next life.

Maybe the most striking aspect of this poem is how affectively plain and observational the language is. Stuart, as speaker, acts as a witness to his own strangeness, as it were, and so the resulting poem is particularly humanizing. It is a private and public document at once, inward- and outward-facing. It’s bracing to consider how Hunt must have been affected herself in assembling this poem. Yet the poem is deftly arranged, with tone shifts, digressions, speculations, and disclosures that make for a layered and complex whole. The labor that Hunt has given to Stuart’s agonies and his expression of them scans as an attempt, ultimately, to release them. The poem signs off at peace, or close to it: “sorry about anything bad I’ve done / enjoy the mild weather.”  

Hunt’s sensibility springs from Wordsworth’s pronouncement that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility,” but there is nothing spontaneously overflowing about it. Hunt’s poetry is highly controlled, assembled with attention to the order in which details are revealed and the patterns they create. It consists of emotion re-assembled and re-activated in tranquility. This collection is a record of what was, and what failed to thrive—energies spent, unkindled sparks, and hesitancies that found expression in writing. But Stranger is not concerned with failure, per se. The startup’s bankruptcy, the various suitors’ troubled messages are false starts in their own ways. In recording them, Stranger affirms instead the life that continues, the strangeness that shapes it, and the poet who marks it all.   

Patrick Carr is one half of @dogsdoingthings on Twitter. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Conduit Magazine, The Florida Review, Lana Turner, Barrow Street, and Action, Spectacle. He lives in Jersey City.