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Comedies [SOLD OUT]

Poems by Simone dos Anjos.

Letterpressed covers. Hand-stitched.

The ocean, wax, ashes, night; snow, clouds, years, dustbeams and veil. The poems of Comedies are full of transient shapes and ungraspable substances, “a nightly / hesitation,” things best held and released in attention’s serial focus. Things best felt as the units of an unembarrassed music that needs to say and needs to leave behind what it has just declared. This “said time,” a writing that moves away from its initial statements and conditions, happens at the pace of what comedy has come to mean (a pleasant diversion) while remarrying itself to what comedy used to be (a buoyant song of organization: from komos (revel) and oidos (poet, singer)). For dos Anjos, the celebratable end is happening all the time, at the edge of word, line, and stanza, an “away” that begins with waking and continues through all efforts at speech and recollection. This sense of a world made of passing generates careful figures for time—not the surface of a sea but “the surface of the sea after a storm”—and little time for figures to transpire:

The party singers
Who are a string of lights
And a year is her first heart
And the second goes by
Like sympathy for oneself
Like a sudden white tulip, white

Comedies: a singing party of ands and likes and years, sudden and sympathetic and then away.

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Simone dos Anjos is co-founder of Parsifal Press, and Editor-in-Chief of The Modern Review.

Read "Common Dice," from Comedies.