ANOTHER LONGUE DURÉE
Vallum Chapbook Series No. 41
Ian Cappelli

What is a box garden, if not rooted rootlessness? And what else might a prose poem be, but a box for seeding the language of flowers? In this shorthand account of self-consciousness, in which lanky lines à la sestinas slalom a chain of chockablock text, the speaker is swathed in a Québécois troupe from whom he’s also excluded. As they tour a suite of foursquare spaces collapsing the edge between inside and out—aquarium, airport, museum, hotel—he’s foremost an interloper in the English he fancies his own (forget about French). A snowshoed flâneur of the “overneath,” for whom scaffolding is the site itself, the unheimlich the only home, he keeps tripping into tautologies and miniature mises-en-abíme, where satellite maps and translation apps only deepen the riddle of what our subjectivity is subject to.

– Andrew Zawacki

In one half of Another Longue Durée, Ian Cappelli gives us a set of smart, witty sentences whose syntax, cool and rational on the surface, belies a contained wildness. The box gardens, appearing stealthily yet faithfully (like Stevens’s blackbirds) in the other half of the poems, perform their own spellbinding disintegration—or liberation?—over and over. But is the box a garden, or the garden a box? The Kippbild might orient us. For despite our best efforts, “the maps app lost us in the city’s tiered particulars.”

– Donna Stonecipher

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