- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
“Barefoot Memory”: Daniel Lassell’s Frame Inside a Frame
by Aimee Seu
“To measure the world, some say / go barefoot.” This seems an apt ars poetica for and from Daniel Lassell’s earthbound collection of poems, Frame Inside a Frame, which traverses wide open landscapes, honors scarred mountains, digs for insects in the muck and witnesses up close the solitary deaths of beautiful animals. Still, the phrase from this potently beautiful collection, which became the magical key to Lassell’s new poems was, for me, “unfamiliar memory.”
In Road Trip, a poem that will reverberate in my imagination for a long time, Lassell’s speaker tells the story of his grandmother who, when young and reckless, “drove across the country without a wallet.” Whether her wallet was lost or forsaken, she and her friends survived with nothing, perhaps slipping through on the currency of their beauty, sidling up to transitory men who indeed had wallets. “They would make men like cigarettes,” Lassell writes in his understated, complex poetics. Lassell conjures the image of a beautiful young woman who expertly painted her nails while leaning on a dashboard radio as wind whipped in every car window, who now, at the truckstop takes a Lucky Strike out of her mouth and places it in the mouth of a hopelessly mesmerized man.
Here we see the subtle enchantment of Frame Inside a Frame and Lassell’s agile voice. Of course there’s the immediate meaning: they gave men a taste for cigarettes and all the things we associate with cigs–reckless delights, glowing fast-life, smoldering desire, toying with death, mystery and adventure. But refocus the lens, find the frame embedded within the more obvious one: these young women composing/crafting/twisting these men (making them) the way one rolls a cigarette. Tilt the image and rewind the rewind, this figurative language is many-sided: now those graceful hands, long rose-red nails painted this morning before the blaring car stereo, are also, in a dreamscape, deftly rolling a man and smoking him down to the filter.
We leap from epic to epic, our attention directed to the forgotten but real tragedies of Floridian fire ants in a buried childhood memory, a long-lost family truck with the floor rotted out and the field below it whirring part, quiet trails beside a solitary Indiana teenager, the small amazing beauty of tea vapor “congealed with light.” The world is closely adored in these pages in a way that makes it, for a moment, seem like our own lost worlds, our own recollections. Lassell’s speaker remembers carefully collected insects that perished in his mason jar “How sometimes what I’d found, I couldn’t set it free.” These poems contend with the overlap of treasuring and mourning. They interrogate whether we’re ever able to successfully trap/amber/reify recollections, even in photographs or language? Do our ruminations trap us in return?
These are poems of contentment (“how hills have never yearned for a new landscape”) and discontent (“the rock / has been in wanting ever since,”) in equal measures and not as opposite poles. Instead, the way I more often experience them: countries breaking against each other each moment, discontent and contentment like shifting tectonic plates, colliding and touching. Here the landscape isn’t backdrop but, as it should be, a feeling, breathing, remembering body: “the way in carving a hilltop open / with a shovel’s knife-edge / the soil looks back / like a wound.” (Frame, page 18.)
Even what didn’t happen but was fantasized can be a formative memory. About a horse from his hometown Lassell creates an alternate fate–
I imagined the horse, if he had untangled his knees from the barbed wire and perhaps shuffled to a river’s nearby elbow. I can see him even now, standing there in my mind, belly filled and leaning toward some breathing destination.
This is one of the most reverent things poetry can do: depict a salvation that didn’t happen. We can sate ourselves this way, on a mirage of heaven that, more lastingly, illuminates the wrong of what did occur. This has the potential to teach something and honors pain, while depicting beauty rather than gore. This is the prayer of a beautiful painting, this is the hope of love songs during war. The daydreamy light of what should be, throws the shadow of devastation’s very real form on the floor.
My reading of Frame Inside a Frame was one of those fateful serendipities where a book aligns with your concurrent experience outside of it. On a road trip of my own, driving into Colorado’s sunflower-millioned highways in late summer I read Lassell’s retelling of Estes Park deer devouring flowers, his incandescent descriptions of “garish pollen,” and of a sunrise that reaches “a little further each day, / then // wandering back.” And on my friends’ birthday, after singing around a turnpike dollarstore’s candle as it burned down into a gas station cupcake, I read Lassell’s words:
You say growing older
doesn’t mean all falling from,
but a leaning into.
If only time were that easy.
Still, how the twisting
within candlesticks converts to
generous blossom…
Lassell’s momentous poetics perceive and reflect back with a gaze somehow both true and tender, at once brutal and gauzed.
Somewhere there is an ambulance
Passing into mountains, a trio of huskies howling
Their hymns like the hurtling
of blood beneath skin.
It is as though that is where Frame Inside a Frame’s eyeline exists: just under the pelt and topsoil where, even in an apparently still place, something is always moving.
Aimee Seu is the author of Velvet Hounds, winner of the 2020 Akron University Poetry Prize selected by Philip Metres. She graduated from Florida State University’s Poetry PhD Program and received her MFA from University of Virginia’s Creative Writing MFA Poetry Program. She was the recipient of the 2019 Academy of American Poets Prize. Other awards she’s received include the 2016 Academy of American Poets Prize at Temple University, the 2020 Henfield Prize for Fiction, the 2020 Los Angeles Review Poetry Award and the Temple University 2016 William Van Wert Award. Her poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared or have forthcoming publications in Poets, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Los Angeles Review, Honey literary, BOAAT, Redivider, Raleigh Review, Diode, Minnesota Review, Blacklist, Adroit, Harpur Palate, Philadelphia Stories, Runestone Magazine, etc. She is a Philadelphia native.
DANIEL LASSELL is the author of Spit, winner of the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks, Ad Spot and The Emptying Earth. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Arkansas International, Colorado Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Poet Lore. Raised in Kentucky, he now lives in Bloomington, Indiana.