Barrelhouse Reviews: Intrusive Beauty, by Joseph J. Capista

Review by Joshua Jones

Ohio University Press / March, 2019 / 79 pp

We often praise books for their ability to encourage second readings. It’s the kind of thing buttoned-up English teachers love pointing to as the origin of the “canon.” That’s fine, if you’re putting together an anthology, but I’m often more fascinated by books that first drive me away and then draw me back in. Joseph J. Capista’s first book, Intrusive Beauty, which Beth Ann Fennelly selected for the 2018 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, is a book of the latter variety. The poems in Intrusive Beauty are, at times, both intrusive and beautiful, confronting the reader with a beauty and violence that it both questions and inhabits.

The book has three sections, but it might be more accurate to say that it’s split in half by a distinct group of narrative poems in the middle. The first and third sections are sometimes romping, sometimes pensive, hopping from an urban pastoral poetry of Baltimore to psychologically dynamic explorations of violence, fatherhood, and education. In one poem, we find the speaker recalling a childhood memory of basement viewing sessions of disaster and death in “someone’s purloined mondo film.” In another, the adult speaker ruminates on the feedback he gives a disabled student’s paper. The central section around which the two halves orbit offers accounts of working in a shelter for boys in and out of trouble with the law.

Intrusive Beauty puzzles over the need for and the difficulty of education. The work of education comes into focus in the central section, where students struggle to overcome trauma and poor choices while the speaker grapples with how best to care for them. But Capista’s not all pedagogy and pedantry. He explores relationships between teachers and students, parents and children, in narratively complex ways. “In the Event of a Fire” demonstrates this approach well: “On midnight rounds, I found the boys had cracked / a bedroom window, sneaked their smoke while staff / smoked ours and hummed transistor honky-tonk.” Capista’s teachers and pupils find themselves separated by their circumstances and their roles despite a genuine, but elusive, communion. In its exploration of education—the poet’s own or his students’—the collection does not pontificate or blindly offer insights. Each scene feels crafted to show the startling impression of having gone to sleep in a desk as a child and having woken up as the adult teacher now responsible for running the lessons.

One of the lessons Capista’s speakers have to learn is how to reconcile the fact of violence with its apparent beauty. In “SOWEBO,” the speaker describes watching one boy assault another, but the occasion of the poem is not so much the assault itself as fixation on “the grace with which / Angelo extends his hand I like your bike / then yanks the boy mid-wheelie.” The speaker can’t acknowledge his complicity in the event: “I’ll say I didn’t watch the boy as he staggered / to a primer-coated station wagon, unsure exactly / what he’d learned.” The poem is not a confession; rather, its speaker can’t get the violence out of his head nor can he shake the troubling grace of that violence. That dissonance never dissipates, and coming to terms with it becomes the goal of the speaker’s moral education.

Capista’s unshakeable taste for beauty manifests in a Hopkinsesque musicality and intricately woven syntax. “Telescope,” the first poem in the collection, illustrates this best, with its serpentine first sentence composed of a chain of similes.

Just look: the egret’s white
Reflects so like a cloud

Pursuing other clouds,
Which blow just like the white

Of wind-borne sand that winds
As if it were the wave

Atumble, breaking crest
All fracture like those shells

That fall from gulls whose beaks
Resemble oyster knives,

The sentence continues almost to the end of the poem. Capista’s work is indeed an oral and aural pleasure. However, some poems resemble Celtic knots without a clear beginning or end of a thought. This trouble is rare, and it’s never long before a narrative and grammatically plainspoken poem arrives to relieve the strain.

Intrusive Beauty includes both formal and free verse poems, moving naturally back and forth between the two in a way that recalls some of Dana Gioia’s collections. “Cornicello” shows Capista at the height of his formal powers. The sonnet describes a little good luck charm the speaker bought for his wife so

that, if death should trace 
his fingertip along your high-boned cheek, 
this tiny, golden horn would help you cheat 
his gaze, illuminate another’s face.

Though formally regular, this Italian sonnet feels fresh and surprising. It’s tempting now to think that every sonnet must subvert the form; instead, Capista leverages the traditional sonnet to provide an emotionally satisfying and surprising turn as the good luck charm’s hoped-for effects and unintended consequences become apparent.

While “Cornicello” and other formal poems shine in the collection, the villanelles feel less well-executed. For example, “Thirtysomething Blues” describes the failure of a couple to meet their career and financial aspirations; in short, “‘I’ll sing like this / someday.’ Those notes won’t pay the taxman, Shan.” But the refrains—where a villanelle ought to shine most—fall short, lacking clear or vivid referents. The lines in question, “It’s not the risk we mind, but consequence” and “Yet now we’ve had, to have not stings. We wince,” miss details that would put flesh on the bones of the couple’s relationship.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the way that Capista keeps the book fresh with some frankly wacky poems. Chief among them is “Manifesto” which begins with an epigraph falsely attributed to itself: “Art solves problems by making problems and makes / problems by solving problems.” The trellised syntax of other pieces gives way to simpler, more energetic language jumping back and forth from aesthetic pronouncements to classroom admonishments. The poem is bafflingly difficult to excerpt, but here’s a typical example:

The poem’s an investment 
vehicle for social capital since, like, B.C.E. 
I do not know whether you could have done 
those cave paintings but you can’t eat here
because this is a Smart Classroom and the kids
you nanny for, if I’m hearing you correctly,
their mom makes you pack a motivational
banana…

Humor and playfulness always risk something, but the risk pays off here and elsewhere in the book as a reprieve from some of the weightier topics.

Intrusive Beauty is an engaging, if imperfect, book of poems, full of pathos and musicality. It demands a reader willing to talk back and engage with its sometimes troubling depictions of violence without setting the book down too long. Making that commitment to reading and rereading offers a significant reward. Some books you reread because you want to get another hit of dopamine. I reread Intrusive Beauty because I wanted a second round with it, to go back for a rematch. Which was, I have to say, more rewarding.

Joshua Jones received his MFA from UMass Boston and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Texas. His poems have most recently appeared in The Woven Tale Press, Waccamaw, and Salamander. He has essays forthcoming in Southwest Review and Hotel Amerika. He's the current reviews editor at The American Literary Review.