How to be Another
Susan Lewis
Červena Barvá Press
ISBN 978-0-9910091-0-7

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft

Begin by cultivating sympathy for the food you torture.  There it lies, splayed on your plate. Chew with open mouth if you want us to hear those tiny screams. This is about quantity as well as quality. Be bold — be brutal — rip your future from its birth throat. Then wash by heart, in cold blood. You might also stand in rich soil until you sprout roots, or jump off a cliff to stimulate wings. The chime of bells on your collar should prove festive & reassuring. Send home the evidence of your liberation in the language of stability, that old warhorse. Your memory will be stored in the proper receptacle. Close the window of your soul if you don’t want to catch its death.

          Several issues back, I reviewed Susan Lewis’s chapbook Commodity Fetishism, a sharp, biting, imaginative, and frequently funny anatomy lesson on capitalism and the maladaptive, solipsistic, and absurd behaviors it creates in those under its commodity-filled fists. Many of the poems I particularly enjoyed in this astounding chapbook (which rightly won publisher Červena Barvá’s award for best chapbook in 2009) appear in How to be Another, such as the Kafkaesque title poem, “Commodity Fetishism,” and the playful, meditative “Half-Life.” I was impressed by the unity in style and substance of Commodity Fetishism and am even more impressed by this volume, which displays an even greater range of Lewis’s work, imagination, and poetic skill. Since, in many ways, How to be Another continues the themes of Commodity Fetishism (and indeed includes many of its poems), this review is in some ways an elaboration on my last review. Thus, rereading or reading for the first time my previous thoughts on Lewis’s work may be helpful before continuing.

          The titular prose poem reproduced in full at the start of this review is an excellent example both of Lewis’s work in general and the quality of this particular collection’s pieces. As in Commodity Fetishism, Lewis’s poems continue here to read like lists or instructions—an intriguing nod, I think, to the prevalence of both in late capitalist culture, drowned as it is in Amazon wish-lists, to-do lists, notes, reminders, and nonsensical instruction manuals for every conceivable thing that could possibly require some assembly. Only, Lewis’s work goes far beyond nodding at the prevalence and absurdity of itemized living by making her “instructions” much more than Dadaist re-imaginings.

          Whether in this era or any other, humans have struggled to empathize with each other, to in effect be another person by taking on his or her point of view and the needs, desires, and fears a subjective experience creates. For creatures perpetually trapped within our own, solitary minds, using language hamstringed by qualia on one side and personal bias on the other, this is often a difficult and exhausting task, even for those of us blessed with a near-limitless capacity for empathy. It can also be a freakishly absurd one—as absurd, say, as jumping from a precipice to “simulate wings”—and a massively painful one—rather like the pain food might feel being masticated to mushy death. And yet, the eye-popping imagery of this poem, the breathlessness of its imagery, suggests that being another—or attempting to be—is a knight’s quest worth the undertaking. For what is the alternative to dying through this process but closing off the window to life?

          Lewis’s poetry frequently deals in slippery and absurd images as her topics are frequently slippery and absurd: romantic and sexual relationships (“Let’s,” “Please Don’t,” “Courtship”), narcissism and self-conceit (“Introduction to Narcissism,” on which she has written three meditations in this collection with the same title), and that song-and-dance of saying what one doesn’t mean in order to say what one actually does mean known as “diplomacy” (“Introduction to Diplomacy”). Unsurprisingly, given the confusing ways in which we humans bind ourselves over these and other complex aspects of living and communicating, Lewis’s work is frequently filled with jokes and puns, as in “Introduction to Physics” (reproduced below in full), which, I suspect, will prompt any scientists with a love for poetry to snicker and which adeptly employs the conceit of the event horizon—the cusp of a black hole—to describe a toxic relationship into which the poem’s addressee is pulling the speaker—to the speaker’s inevitable demise (just as matter is destroyed in a black hole).

You can run but you can’t Hyde. This is a dark matter of which you speak. Your options spiral fast & deep, growing weighty as a hill of beans, massive as choice. Perhaps this half-life is better than none. Turn back when you get to any destination.  You might expect some sort of view, a reward for following the rules to their logical conclusions. Think again. Sink again, but don’t blink again. In the event of an event, seek the horizon. Call your physicist to go black in the morning. Don’t suck me into your empty center — I’ve already got plenty of nothing to go around. & don’t be so dense, going on about destiny, as if the universe revolves around you. The hole problem lacks substance — not that it particulately matters.

          As with Franz Kafka, whose beetle-like spirit twitches through each of Lewis’s anxious list-poems, Lewis is often at her best when she tells parables, many of which are every bit as surprising, unnerving, and thoughtful as those of Kafka himself. In “Golden Anniversary,” she explores the vicissitudes—sexual, spiritual, and alternately humorous and horrifying—of growing old with a spouse at one’s side; “Night after Night” translates a conversation between book and reader into humorous and very literal terms. The best poem in the book, “The Deal,” explores frustrations and fantasies about disability and able-bodiedness in terms that I think many people who have lived with chronic illnesses and other acquired disabilities will find familiar. In this piece, a girl who has been sick for years makes a surrealist’s Faustian bargain with a doctor to feel “astoundingly, imaginably, well” again, only to find that his cure, which makes various parts of her body vanish for a day at a time, causes more anxiety and interpersonal problems than her sickness ever did. In this parable of treatment, side effects, and self-perception, Lewis takes down and rejects ableism and the “cure culture” it creates, disabled people being treated more as problems to be fixed than human beings who are often more disabled by the dysfunctions of culture than by the particular disability itself.

…Her ever-changing disabilities were a stumbling block to new relationships. First one, then another attractive young man would accept her lack of, say, a left foot, only to withdraw & abruptly disappear when the same foot would be fine the next week, & instead she was missing a buttock. Similar difficulties arose at school, at work — even at her local grocer’s. Soon, she found herself living in almost total isolation — lying about, reading, eating — not unlike the life she used to lead when she was sickly. Eventually, she actually felt sick.   At around the same time, she realized all her parts were intact. None of them felt particularly wonderful, but she recognized the old discomforts with fond recognition, like long-lost old friends.

          Challenging, thoughtful, and descriptively dense as a black hole, Lewis’s work compels the reader, tearing apart (post)modernity and its discontents, each poem exploring and locating centers of empathy, connection, and wholeness. Readers who enjoyed her previous chapbook should pick this up for the full experience of which Commodity Fetishism provided a mere scion.