BRIAN
BURMEISTER Reviews
UNMARK by Montreux Rotholtz
(Burnside Review Books, 2017)
Unmark, the Burnside Review Press
Book Award-winning debut collection from poet Montreux Rotholtz is haunting and ambitious.
The book’s 50 poems run a wide-sprectrum of content—explorations of creation
and destruction, love and death, mythologies of ghosts and devils and mankind—and,
through Rotholtz’s brilliant subtlety, force the reader to reflect on the world
we live in and the impact we have on it and each other.
Rotholtz
has an incredible skill for clear and unique descriptions. The sensory details
she conjures pull the reader into each moment. Her visual depictions are
valuable, precise: “veins like the cable or a bridge,” for instance. Yet it is
often the other sensory-work for which Rotholtz stands out among her peers. She
writes, “At dawn we heard the horses, / their voices like the sick crunch / of
fire, a fungus-sound that grew heedless in our ears” and “He smelled of damp,
of fires put out, / soaked charcoal, static held in the lines.” Her words have
the uncanny ability to transport her readers, to effectively make us see, hear,
and smell exactly what she wants us to experience.
Helping
make Unmark so powerful is that Rotholtz
has a strong sense of each poem’s form and the impact of those choices. The
most narrative pieces in the collection, such as “The Shelter,” are oriented on
the page in unexpected ways: the words running in a down-to-up direction,
instead of left-to-right. The long lines this creates allow for more emphasis
to be placed on the scene, the moment, instead of individual words or sentence
fragments. Ten of the poems are approached in this way, an unconventional move
on the part of Rotholtz, but one which benefits those stories. Other poems such
as “The Summit” take a physical form on the page—in this case, a narrow column
of text representing a steep cliff—which embody and further the poems’ messages.
Perhaps
most remarkable of all, Rotholtz provides moments which make one take pause at
her words and at the profound truth she presents—“The present time is in fact /
an honest glancing piece of equipment”--or of keenly relatable experiences—“We
found ourselves at the boundary. It was there / that the white line was, the
mark beyond which there appeared to be no difference, though it could be felt /
in the skin.” Her skill isn’t just in story-telling and description, but in
making us think. One of the best examples of this in the collection is “Untitled,”
which tells the story of a woman murdered near a school library. The poem is
haunting both in its imagery—“She had only three teeth left / which was the
most shocking thing”—and in how it forces the reader to grapple with how we
respond to tragedy and death. The title itself, “Untitled,” serves as a
powerful reminder that such things are not easily, if ever, fully understood or
labeled.
Simply
put: Unmark is a compelling,
expertly-crafted collection of poems which often challenge the reader as much
as they delight. Rotholtz delivers that which we expect from the best
poetry—beautiful and unique descriptions, incredible command of rhythm and
form—but it is her poems’ ability to make us reflect and think about our world
which places her among today’s most exciting emerging poets.
*****
Brian Burmeister teaches communication at Iowa State
University. He is a regular contributor at Cleaver Magazine, and
his writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He
can be followed on Twitter: @bdburmeister.
