APICALITY

Jean Day

In Apicality (here, movement toward a point or apex, as in plant growth), Day concerns herself with morphologies writ large--those of creative plant and animal life, historical thinking, knowledge, sound patterning, shapes of optimism and its opposite. The book's two sequences ("Ex Ovo Omnia," "And Now This") are part of her larger, as yet unpublished The Elements, a work that probes first (and lost) causes.

The book's procedure is proliferative, passionate, and by turns funny and tragic. Following Webster's second meaning of apical ("of, relating to, or formed with the tip of the tongue"), shapes and sounds form and reform in her poems, from jellyfish and "premodern thoughts," along slant logics and rhymes ("ballet-wallet," "fathomless-fatherless," "tongue-wherefrom"), into figurations of identity and experience--an apple becoming a pear becoming a new version of creation. At the same time, the poems put pressure on forms of knowledge--scientific, cultural, linguistic--and on conceptions of the "natural." "Morphology makes us strange," Day says in "Ex Ovo Omnia," but it also makes us complicit in the sheer implausibility of human life as we know it: "Yet geometry's no less in the head / than a series of jerks / as we emerge from the water wet / to find ourselves / butts of a formal if not rational / concern."