Attached Houses

Where did these poems come from? I ask myself that question whenever I read them. Michelle Gil-Montero is a conjurer. “Our belly was the felt rut of Roman road,” she says, in a voice both ancient and intimate, narrating a story of two lovers that is also, mysteriously, the story of where we all came from and how we love, and live—in houses, in storms, among searchlights, crows, a fog that hugs us with “odd fondness.” Michelle Gil-Montero delights, as Niedecker and Stein delighted, in turning words and sounds into objects themselves. A rocking chair “unfurls a choir of feral cats.” Bird names kindle fire. An arm and chin, cradling a violin, form an imagistic—really, magic— “palindrome.” In these poems, body, language, music, and instrument merge into the single force of Yeats’ dancer-and-dance. I could go on, but you should just read the poems! They are the real thing. Few poets are writing with such seriousness and fluency. -Joy Katz

With their paradoxical co-embodiment of impulse and exactitude, Michelle Gil- Montero’s lyrics remind me of Marosa Di Giorgio’s work, and of a neuron’s. Here poetics is physics: what’s linked in a few syllables of sound and association can have at once dazzling and coruscating effects— “close storms, a braille music”—depending on the scale or closeness with which it is perceived. Thus the lyric’s intimacy is both gorgeous and terrible, human fluency both a delicious and an unbearable double valence, an aptitude for being turned simultaneously both inside and out. As a multi-lingual poet and translator who has brought the most complex and lyric propositions into a reactive, dynamic English, Michelle Gil- Montero knows that virtuosity appears effortless because of the extreme pressure which fires it: it springs through a torqued synapse, puts the twist in the Möbius strip. -Joyelle McSweeney