Nikki Allen's quite like yes

Nikki Allen dedicates quite like yes, her newest poetry collection, "This is for axis and rust and that busted little bruise, my heart." "Heart" is what drives her tender, fiercely honest poems; quite like yes is the heart made legible.

Nikki, whose catalog of self-published chapbooks number over a dozen (including last year's multi-volume birds at 4 a.m.), and whose performances map multiple states and venues from national slams to public buses, has crafted an authoritative and unique voice. Her poems wield whip-smart sound and rhythm, and her imagery is intimate and vivid. Her poems are portraits of emotion, sometimes whimsical happiness, sometimes devastation, and always intensely present.

Both the free verse and prose poems in the collection often reflect on the past, and these poems usually characterize a personal era rather than limiting themselves to a single event. The details Nikki selects to portray these times achieve a concreteness that prevents nostalgia from lapsing into sentimentality, as does her firm belief in present consciousness, best articulated in the opening poem, "Proximity.":

"And to think
Of all the scotch tape on the walls
of rooms we left behind.
We could build houses out of our past shrines
We could plaster our hearts
But it won't do any good
It's a surface you can't cover
Even with both hands."

Although she acknowledges that these events, places and people are gone, they remain catalogued vividly in her imagery, holding parallel space with the present, so the two continuously co-occur. Present observation, memory, musing and thought lend each other context. Whether she illustrates the ambience of the past, like "(the last time I saw you)", or within a specific immediate setting, as in "beans by window," another important technique she uses is to incisively concentrate the poem's scope within the space of a few lines. An especially powerful example is the laser-sharp ending of "(the last time I saw you)", when, after describing the general terms of the relationship, the poem moves to a list of things the speaker misses, finally focusing on:

"The living room light switch in your apartment
I bet
I could still
Find it
in the dark"

When these movements occur in poems and throughout the book, their effect startles the reader into realizing exactly what evokes the speaker's sorrow, anger or love.

Nikki has named e.e. cummings as an influence, and her writing reflects this in several elements, most obviously, in her personalized use of punctuation.In "--death on 48th street," she makes use of spacing and parentheses to shift the phrases' emphases to illustrate the theme of loneliness and separation. Another similarity she and cummings share is a lighthearted optimism and celebration of love. For all the difficult subject matter she addresses, she moves as easily in the positive, as in "Un(bee)," where she writes "Dent the placemat with grin, get better."
In the prose piece "a night out," she recalls a friend or lover and revels their intimacy in lines like "our eyes own the same compass." Its closing stanza counters the previous lines' reverie with a series of questions arguing the cosmic rightness of their breakup, and concludes with the wise, bittersweet lines "Oh my right now but soon used to be. Someday, remind yourself." Also like cummings, even when she wields social criticism, she does so with witty turns of phrase and humor, as in "beans by window," where she mocks university students and women parading their wealth among a coffee shop's motley assortment of patrons.

Some of the most intimate and moving poems in the collection address recurring themes. "Mg+, then up" and "(whistle)" explore the contradictions and turmoil associated with antidepressants and therapy with unwavering self-reflection and admant dedication to excavating complex layers. Other recurring themes are the challenge of existing in everyday situations like commuting to work and in urban environments. Many also examine personal relationships. But some of her most singular poems are those that address no apparent specific incident or person.

These include pieces like "trigger", "the stamps that self address" and "like you mean it," which, in particular, reads with the manifesto urgency Nikki conveys so strikingly in her readings. The poem's use of repetition and rhythmic shifts in list form are trademark Nikki Allen, and are techniques she absolutely excels at, building momentum at a pace that's enough to drive blood to skin surfacey, pulse into your breath, and inspiration straght to the mind:

"come on, do it for the kids.
do it for the mechannics and
do it for the dali in me, and that great big heart in you.
do it for the bars in minneapolis.
do it for the microphones. do it for your voice in the monitors-
request more of it. [...]"

This technique is one that also occasionally elicits the criticism that she includes too much in each piece. While her ability to bring visceral imagery and emotion to her work does make me wonder what ceratn of these poems would look like if they focused in a more traditional manner, accepting the poems as they are is more challenging and more appropriate. To do so, a reader must abandon narrative structure to the emotional current that links her images, and allow the meter to take over with rhythm that ebbs and surges with its force. When all the details describe a clear subject, the poem's mood and ambience are practically tangible. When the topic is more subjective, like in "trigger.", and seems to be about a mood or musing, each idea summons a facet of that feeling, each description points towards it until we sense the subject in the space at the center of the shape they leave around it. These poems are moving and personal for their honest approach, their immediate view into the mind. They work precisely for their ability to combine ambigbuous subject matter (or, rather, topics that reach outside the traditional poetic focus on a specific object, incident or person) with an abundance of descriptive images and observations.

The book's second section, "limbs", includes some of the strongest pieces, including my favorite "how we went. (in six)". Nikki does some of her clearest work in this medium, and, as a relatively new style for her published poetry, it will be interesting to see how she uses it in the future.

Nikki Allen is master of her idiolect. Whatever her topic, her use of languge reveals a mind constantly invested in making words as new, powerful and immediate as possible, and sound as beautiful as its meaning is striking. Lines like "Some hyphened hands and their grabbing get/ Black hole precarious/ hums along to backyard melody/ On Sundays that feel like spring, like spring" are exemplary of the melodic, carefully re-shaped language Nikki is so good at creating.

Nikki has been a great teacher of mine in both the art of writing poetry, and of living up to it. i'm lucky to know her, and each one of us is lucky to read her words. If you care to bear witness, check her out the the next New Yinzer presents, August 20 at Modern Formations.