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Starting this week, we’ll be highlighting the five finalists in the poetry category for the BTBA. Similar to what we did for the fiction longlist, these will be framed by the question: “Why should this book win?”
Click here for all past and future posts in this series.
Today’s post is by poetry committee member Kevin Prufer.
The Book of Things by Aleš Šteger, translated by Brian Henry
Language: Slovenian
Country: Slovenia
Publisher: BOA Editions
Pages: 92
Why This Book Should Win: The poems in Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things focus with nearly comic intensity on an array of everyday objects—an egg, a coat, a toothpick, a stomach. Here, a potato recollects the soil it came from. Or a hand dryer speaks a windy language we can’t quite understand. Or a doormat forgives us all. But Šteger’s poems go far beyond mere comic description, personification, or metaphor. Rather, his objects reflect our own strange complexities—our eagerness to consume, our rationalizations and kindness. Our many cruelties and our grandiosities.
Each of these fifty poems (the book includes seven sections of seven poems plus one introductory “proem” titled “A”) fixates with obsessive detail on a different, focusing on the turnings of its imagined mind. A loaf of bread “asks you to do him harm, for you to stab him / To shred him to pieces, consume his still warm body.” “Yes, yes,” Šteger concludes, “he loves you, that is why he accepts your knife. / He knows that all his wounds crumble in your hand.” Or, of a pair of windshield wipers, he writes: “Both of them hide something, / That is why they move in such harmony. / Like two serfs in black rubber boots.”
At times playful or grimly serious, the effect of these poems slowly gathers until one has the sense not of looking at everyday objects anew, but of being looked at anew by the once inconsequential objects that surround us. And, reflected in their many, multifaceted eyes, we do no fair well.
Šteger’s The Book of Things is harrowing and hilarious, unnerving and weirdly familiar—and, most of all, ambitious in its attempt to look anew into our all-too-human darkness. And translator, Brian Henry (himself a poet of significant talent) renders these poems beautifully into an English that is both colloquial and disconcertingly plainspoken.
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“South”
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of. . .
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Three Percent is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
