Following his award-winning debut collection, Spit, Daniel Lassell has put forth the revelatory Frame Inside a Frame, published by Texas Review Press this month. Cinematic in its visual composition, Lassell often borders his subjects in frames, archways, and windows to offer fragmentary perspectives—ordinary moments from the midwest hinterlands that document the people in the “wide loneliness of gas station aisles” and the llamas with teeth “yellowing like corn kernels.” Sonically tactile, with lines such as, “Stirred as ether, / lathered against current. / Even sand from sleeves / slips / to clumsy earth. / The angler’s arrow tangles / in muddy branches.” These poems are best read in an empty house (or a dark closet, if that’s the only place where you can manage an escape). In the quiet, you might hear the whirring hum and click of an old projector as Lassell’s memories and meditations shift to study his agrarian upbringing and the ecological degradation he’s inherited.
“Frame,” the opening poem which contains allusions to Dante’s Inferno, serves as a gateway into a landscape that is familiar yet daunting. Lassell’s underworld is as if Salvador Dalí painted rural Americana in its vast barrenness, its suffocating “advancing, limitless gray.” Our guide knows his way around well and provides ample reassurance that we have nothing to fear in this place, despite the lack of oxygen. Instead, settle in—find calm in the “textured abyss.” Lassell’s hell is a wheatfield where “Wind combs / garish pollen” because “fruition / will not matter.” Desolate and apocalyptic, even the farmers have given up their plots and toil. “Religion will whisper / like a distant pond,” he writes of a country growing more secular, more hopeless—a generation that is witness to daily atrocities on their smartphones. What is there to do but settle in? The poet’s casual directives and rhetorical questions invite us into this new normal: “On my hell-porch, I will / laugh with friends / about what the prophets knew / but did not share.” The future is enveloped in feelings of “constant / emptying… [and] loosening joy” as the poem ends with the following outline to prepare us for the unnerving trek:
There will always be
another room,
ever a lowering spear
winnowing at the self,
ever a reflecting cave
or palace.
Lassell’s sage advice is that poetry promises a “hundred doorways” into “Downward Rooms,” portals, labyrinths, and mirrors to get lost in. Language can be picked up, examined from a slightly different angle, and reveal something totally new. Grain, a symbol for the body of Christ, is present alongside other religious iconography, like altars and churchgoers, speaking to the presence of spirituality in the natural world. “Winnowing” implies the separation of poor elements and impurities from valuable parts of the crop. Poetry, too, is a process of elimination and extraction as the poet and reader share in mutual transformation and critical self-analysis.
The poem “The Glassmaker’s Bench” is reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s “Dare you see a soul at the White Heat?” where her skepticism of religious doctrine leads her to position herself as an almighty blacksmith—hammering, tempering, and re-forming her verse to forge the soul. Lassell takes on the role of a glassmaker by similarly likening the poet to a craftsman, using language as raw materials. This is most evident in the “Temple of Salt” sequence where Lassell uses the King James version of the Bible as a main source text for an erasure poem of the Book of Genesis, retelling mythologies by stretching them like an amorphous and molten substance, snipping away excess until he discovers lines like “a smoking furnace / a burning lamp” (a symbol of God’s presence and covenant with Abraham) and “there is none so wise / as Art,” which transfers the divine wisdom and authority from Joseph to the artist.
In “The Glassmaker’s Bench,” all the classical elements of creation are present—earth, air, fire, water—in this raw prose poem, yet he reminds us of the tenderness and precarity of this artistry: “Such devotion and tenacity, this shaping. An intention twisted into existence. Doesn’t matter. In the end, the hardened object is a fragile object—like the body, the earth.” It’s as if the planet is an objet d’art, endlessly valuable and illuminated in exhibition lighting instead of the sun.
Lassell interrogates what we assign value to and choose to memorialize, whether it be from personal or national histories. In the poem “Museum of Exits,” he considers why ordinary wood becomes notable when a Kentucky pioneer, Daniel Boone, chisels into it. A nod not only to America’s colonialist folklore of Manifest Destiny but also nature’s own destructive and indelible tendencies, he writes:
. . . Power equals
preservation, which is why
the river islands, too,
have chipped away, thinned
as the glacier that carved
the Ohio Valley.
Preservation is a key theme of Frame Inside a Frame. It’s almost as if the reader walks through a photo gallery in a family home, with snapshot after snapshot of glossy memories from different times and places: Kentucky in 2003, West Virginia in 2011, Florida in 1991, Indiana in 2015. Our faces mirrored, we are reminded of the glassmaker’s “vaporous melt” as Lassell’s handicraft moves steadily between disconnected scenes: instruction on how to properly skip a stone, a grandmother’s wild road trip, the elementary school janitor dealing with grief, farmers mourning a harvest, the family dog’s guilt after eating an entire holiday feast and sparing only the bones. Although these superimposed memories of childhood swordfights or conversations with a neighbor disappointed with her daughter’s love life feel autobiographical, Lassell reminds the reader of the chasm between poet and speaker, that these “slice of life” moments demand a closer look, and that these imaginative renderings serve to structure a narrative.
Perhaps the frame conceit is most actualized in the poem “Proximity Continuum” that opens:
Our existence reduced
to aperture. Pictures and their
piecemeal weather, relatives
staring without hurry
like geodes fractured into
embers.
Our stratified understanding of “aperture” suggests an opening of some kind, like the gaps of an erasure, or the space that light slips through into a photographic lens, or a telescope that breaks through night to search out a distant star. Darkness is a recurring subject in this underworld, a place where guests burp at the dinner table and birds are exchanged for “inquisitive bats and demons.” It is a place where “[w]hen curtains open, / more darkness will pour in.” Dickinson reminds us that on a lampless night, one must let the eyes adjust; “We grow accustomed to the Dark—.”
It seems Lassell’s central aim is to record his Kentucky roots and the legacy of the working class, panning from the farmers devoted to a “soft summer rain” to the “coal-filled mountains” depicted in the 1973 documentary, Harlan County USA. His pastoral elegizes Kentucky from an ecopoetic lens as industry greed depletes the land of its resources and risks the workers’ health and livelihoods. The family’s farmhouse is surrounded by smokestacks and “ghost-lit air” as he examines the “many absences in this life.” He descends into those sooty caves to find what miners sought:
They insisted
that gems fruit under pressure, given time. . . .
But grief is grief, I realized; it lives
enough already in the soil and forests, more
commonplace than joy. The miners enjoyed
the hunt, whereas I enjoyed the peace
intrinsic in any calm, thinking that fulfillment
rests between chaos and comfort.
