Pure Product, Jason Guriel

Jason Guriel’s second collection of poems is infatuated with forms.Pure Product examines structures that include Derek Jeter’s batting stance, fences, bookshelves, grammar and idioms, and the literary canon. Crafted and crafty, Guriel’s poems notice shapes and systems—and beg readers to notice theirs.

The poems in Pure Product bear delightfully weird titles (including “Thinginess,” “Song of the North American Lawn,” and “Five Sonnets for Summer Storage in the High School Book Room”); many of Guriel’s poems deliver equally charming lines that boast unexpected verbs and rhyme and dense sound play. “Your forearm supplies the sock puppet’s spine,/ your thoughts checker the sock’s, your will argyles/ the plain white weave,” begins “Spineless Sonnet.” The aforementioned “Thinginess” revels in redefining abstraction: “Thinginess is…the doorstopper-/ability of phonebooks,/ the necessary tubing/ that defines/ the nothing blowing/ thru ducts.”

Most often, Pure Product lingers in this territory—bemused, inquisitive, littered with punch lines. My favourite poems in the book deal explicitly with the structures of words and idioms. The memorable “Dear Reader” asks, “Dear Reader, recall when novelists called/ out to you?—you the newly-minted/ middle- class, literate and lamp-lit.” “Upright in Bed” is far more personal than the other poems in the collection, and is a striking portrait of a father after a stroke: “an arm can be chopped off/ and not, by one stroke/ of a clot that’s half-cleaver/ half-knot.”

At times, I found Guriel’s striking style a little heavy-handed, mostly due to his atypical line-breaks and multisyllabic rhyme ( “diorama”/ “deus ex machina” or “generalization”/ “abstraction”). On the whole, Guriel’s poems are mischievous, meditative, and invigorating; Pure Product challenges and charms the reader.