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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
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Anthony Opal

A Review of Brooklyn Copeland’s Laked, Fielded, Blanked


​          Brooklyn Copeland’s latest chapbook, Laked, Fielded, Blanked, is an exploration of the ways in which language interacts with silence, or the ways in which lived experience interacts with the page, or the ways in which the reader interacts with the writer – in wakefulness. The collection contains three poems, “Morse,” “Notes on Vanishing” and “Seall,” and is about twenty pages long. However, page count can be misleading here, as each page contains only a small section of each poem, leaving the rest of the page empty. Or maybe empty is the wrong word. When I asked Copeland about the significance of blank spaces in her writing, she said:
​My poems have never been “long” or wordy, and a length of blankness, for me, holds nearly the same value as a string of words. I think words come to life when you give them room to breathe. When I see a lot of space on the page, I know that I should read the poem slowly. Even poems made up of a single word can be read slowly, you know? Once you’ve read the poem, you have enough elbow room to work out your reactions to the poem and relate the poem to your own experience.
          And this “elbow room,” as Copeland puts it, is not only found in the ample white spaces surrounding the text, but in the text itself, in the spaces and indentations that Copeland uses to create a certain syntax, soundscape, or image – the way a piece of paper is folded to give a single plane multiple dimensions. The first poem in the collection, “Morse,” begins:
Morse Lake forms
where the Big
creek meets

the Little creek—
bits of boat,
bits of dock

mark the spot--
          As the poem continues, Copeland goes on to speak of feeding rocks to diseased ducks, opening geodes, breaking hammers, and finding dead fish that smell “red.” All in all, a day at the waterfront that ends up sounding strangely familiar…yet utterly unique. And that’s the brilliance of it. Copeland’s poetry is not flashy, or “baroque,” as she puts it, but human in that it expresses one’s honest interactions with nature, others, and oneself with a straightforward originality that is hard to find in a poetic milieu dominated by the avant-garde and the mundane. The very musicality of Copeland’s language is the result of colloquial speech arranged in such a way that words expose themselves for the music that they already are.

​          In this way, Copeland is the sort of writer that, no matter her subject, is ever present in her poems. Even in an outward-looking nature poem such as “Notes on Vanishing,” Copeland’s energy can be felt in the precise imagery and playful language. One section reads:
Gravid stems
erupt.

The hale
yellows pale once

they’re plucked.

And then:

The smallness of this
colloquial cannot

muffle the full morning orchestra--

amphibious greens
clotting the trickle

of thaw. The tinny

fin flip and eyeflake flash—
small schools that

give shimmer in the dull

​sulk of wind.
          When I asked Copeland about “Notes on Vanishing,” she said that it’s a poem about, “…tribal Baltic-Finnic languages, some of which are truly vanishing. The idea runs parallel to vanishing natural landscapes, particularly in a part of the world that feels like my second home.” In this way, Copeland illustrates yet again just how much gravity can be contained (or not contained) in the be-coming void and empty spaces.

          The collection ends with the poem “Seall,” – perhaps the strongest of the three. It is a bodily poem in both subject and sound. Whereas the rhythms of “Notes on Vanishing” gesture toward the rhythms of nature, “Seall” gestures toward, or moves with, the rhythms of the body. One section reads:
Our pulses
gulp
in rhyme
upon release— our

bodies beyond
us
siphon,
​harbor.
          This is an example of Copeland’s covert profundity, using that which has been articulated in the first two poems about nature and the reservoir, and combining the two to illuminate the connectedness of the personal to the communal to the natural. In this way, Copeland is a meditative – even ‘confessional’ – poet who manages to transcend egoism without leaving behind her own personhood. The collection ends with two fragments that read:
Midnight
integral--
each night

an event--
we find in

mismatched
Coke glasses

Svedka, chokeberry

wine—I clutch
your musk
your brine

to my
breast

& goad

-

Star bands
tack layers

to longer days—
black satin,

white linen—
either,
always
​wide awake.
          These last two words, “wide awake,” seem a fitting end to the collection, as one has the sense after reading these poems that though Copeland is no blind idealist or naive dreamer, but rather someone who manages to write with a certain joy born of an unassuming openness toward the waking, lucid moment.





--
Anthony Opal lives in Chicago where he is chapbook review editor for TriQuarterly Online and a grad student at Northwestern University. His poems have most recently appeared in Boston Review, Notre Dame Review, Harpur Palate, Permafrost, and The Greensboro Review.

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  • Home
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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
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    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
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      • e Fall 2022
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      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
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      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
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      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022