Like by A.E. Stallings. FSG, 2018. 160 pp. $24.00 (hardback)

But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor… it is the mark of genius.
—Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Francis Fergusson

In Like (2018), A.E. Stallings’ latest volume of poetry, a washing machine is Pandora’s box. A cast iron skillet, accidentally scrubbed with soap, is a “hero stripped of his arms.” A hero’s death is “elusive quarry,” a wary deer. The heart is both an island and a city split “between two alphabets.” A bed is a refugee’s raft rattling across the wine-dark Aegean. The dead rest like bread loaves. Olives are “hammered thumbs.” The suitors slain by Odysseus are rigid, gasping fish; their souls are a cloud of bats. Swallows “bitch and bicker,” just like us. A fleck of glitter is a “broken mirror.” Some similes are left unfinished: cars without drivers, vehicles awaiting tenors. In short, the word “like” is verbal kudzu, sprawling over the apocryphal landscape of the English language. Here, the poet is an archivist, and Like is a labyrinth.

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Like, Stallings’ fourth collection, continues to trace the watermarks of mythology against the walls of the poet’s own life. The speaker of these poems is by turns the Minotaur, a brooding “art monster”; Alice, a disoriented young girl who can’t remember her name (“Liza, Lacie?”); but most often, “a faded blonde/ on the brink of middle age,” hoping that a color treatment might “lengthen [the light] just a little.” As always, Stallings invites and inhabits an ensemble of voices and characters that are as diverse as her poetic forms. And Like is perhaps her most formally inventive yet. Within this capacious archive of poetry, there are ballads, blues, found poems, prose poems, syllabics, and an array of sonnets. There’s an epic, 36-part meditation on evanescence and memory in ottava rima(!), a titular sestina that uses the word “like” 49 times, and the book itself acts as an abecedarian, the poems arranged alphabetically, rather than being cordoned off into standard sections (I., II., III., etc.). This evolving formal acumen proves once again that Stallings is one of the English language’s most gifted versifiers, and Like is perhaps her most exquisite, accomplished book yet.

Curious word, “like” is the hinge of a simile, a near meaningless stop-gap of speech, and the defining symbol of social media. With its myriad functions and connotations, “like” coheres this collection. Here, the project of making metaphors is presented as a function of time, and time as an archive to which we add our likes, our likenings, our likenesses. In no other book has Stallings’ formal dexterity been allied so closely with thematic concern.

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While the opening villanelle, “After a Greek Proverb,” declares the collection’s preoccupation with time, the second poem, “Ajar,” announces its twin obsession with metaphor. As so often in a Stallings poem, a thin domestic veil belies an under-arching mythology. Literally, the poem is about a broken washing-machine door. Arranged in five tercets with medial caesurae in each line, the form itself cracks open fissures. Ever the advocate of rhyme (“they are nothing to be ashamed of,” she says in her treatise, “Presto Manifesto!”), Stallings goes all out here, rhyming both the ends of the lines and the internal breaks.

This simple domestic inconvenience of the broken washing-machine door unlocks the story of Pandora, bride who couldn’t help but look inside the jar she was forbidden to look inside. Of course, she opened it and “out all trouble flew.” Some versions of the myth claim that one thing remained in the jar after the chaos: “Hope.” Here’s the poem’s final stanza, and its ingenious turn:

Or so the tale asserts—      and who am I to deny it?
Yes, out like black-winged birds,      the woes flew and ran riot,
But I say that the woes were words,      and the only thing left was quiet.

The troubles that Pandora unleashed on the world, flying helter-skelter like a murder of furies, were, according to our poet, words, our babble, the matter from which all metaphor is made. Stallings wrangles with language, plies poetic forms in order to achieve these epiphanic silences. The book echoes with them.

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In apophatic theology, knowledge of God can only be obtained through negation, by speaking of all the things that God is not. Stallings, though not a theological poet, often writes by this same principle: don’t talk about the thing itself, but the things that surround it. A poem that perhaps best exemplifies this paradoxical strategy is “Momentary.” Composed of four In Memoriam stanzas, or iambic tetrameter quatrains rhyming ABBA (such a thoughtful marriage of form and subject), the poem is one of the book’s many finely faceted gems, one that reveals the book’s project of using metaphor to mark time. “I never glimpse her but she goes,” the speaker begins, “Who had been basking in the sun, / Her links of chain mail one by one / Aglint with pewter, bronze, and rose.” The chinks of armor here are the scales of a snake, who the poet never sees “lying coiled / Atop the garden step.” The serpentine present moment is always slithering off unseen:

Too late I notice as she passes
Zither of chromatic scale–
I only ever see her tail
Quicksilver into tall grasses.

This stanza demonstrates Stallings’ talent for layering metaphors. The fleeting instant is a snake, a stringed instrument, a harmonic scale of tone and light. The final stanza recapitulates the poem’s thesis—that we only understand time by its passing—in Stallings’ understated style:

I know her only by her flowing,
By her glamour disappearing
Into shadow as I’m nearing—
I only recognize her going.

The gerunds and present participles piled at the ends of these lines gives the poem a satisfyingly harmonic resolution, one that seems to keep ringing past the last line. This subtle, potent union of sound and meaning characterizes so many of the poems in Like. Revelations need not roar.

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Unlike poets whose tireless subject is the self, Stallings puts her mind center stage, shows you how things—objects, mythologies, mundane tasks of the everyday—filter through her poetic intellect. As these things pass through, they’re refracted, transformed, like light through a prism. Hence, in her hands a pair of scissors, echoing the drafter’s compass from Donne’s “Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” becomes a metaphor for marriage. Whereas Donne used the metaphysical conceit of the compass to prove that he and his wife were always together, even when apart, Stallings takes a more cynical view (she is never sentimental), seeing the scissors as “knives at cross-purposes, bereaving / Cleavers to each other cleaving.” A practitioner of paradox, Stallings pushes these star-crossed little blades to their raison d’être, ends the poem with them cutting “the crisp sheet where they met and married, / The paper where the blades are buried.” Most would write directly about the struggles of marriage, but Stallings, elusive poet that she is, always takes us through the metaphorical backdoor. (Elsewhere, she writes about marriage as a bed infested with bed bugs: “Maybe it’s best to burn the whole thing down.”)

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While other reviewers have done a fine job of unpacking Stallings’ ottava rima masterpiece, sure to be counted along with Yeats’ “Among Schoolchildren” and Byron’s Don Juan as exemplars of the difficult form, I feel there’s been too little said about the book’s eponymous, “Like, The Sestina.” It is the cheekiest, most satirical poem in the collection, one that exaggerates its formal constraints by making all of the sestina’s repeating end words, “like.” Despite its playfulness, the poem is crucial to understanding the book’s project, and placing Stallings’ mythopoetic impulse in the context of contemporary American speech, pathological social media use, and the politics of popular poetry.

“Now we’re all ‘friends,’” the poem begins, “there is no love but Like, / A semi-demi-goddess, something like / A reality-TV-star look-alike.” The poem pulls no punches, openly lampooning our monoculture of mass Like. We measure our world, our worth, even our politics by the Like. But Stallings doesn’t come off as some pedantic schoolteacher decrying the evils of social media. She invites us to laugh at our collective foolishness. In one segment of the poem, Stallings eavesdrops on a cliché “valley-girl” conversation:

                                        “I’m like,
So OVER him,” I overhear. “But, like,
He doesn’t get it. Like, you know? He’s like
It’s all OK. Like I don’t even LIKE
Him anymore. Whatever. I’m all like…”

This passage is so clever because the form nearly disappears under the pressure of typical speech. Like litters the highways of the American tongue. We’re so careless with it. We toss it out the window like chewing gum, or Styrofoam cups, a perfect, permanent piece of the Anthropocene’s detritus. Stallings also characterizes Like as “invasive zebra mussels, or it’s like / Those nutria things, or kudzu, or belike // redundant fast-food franchises, each like / (More like) the next.” How well this poem sums up our vernacular. We are gluttons of Like, and this spills over into the state of American poetry. If social media is more often about self-promotion rather than sharing, then it’s no surprise that the poetry that courses through its viral veins is all about the self and the cult of identity. Stallings, a poet trained in the classics who’d rather archive the contents of her mind than bare her scars, defends her cerebral, rhyme-driven (not a pejorative!) poetry:

                    Those poets who dislike
Inversions, archaisms, who just like
Plain English as she’s spoke—why isn’t “like”
Their (literally) every other word? I’d like
Us just to admit that’s what real speech is like.

Poetry, Stallings assures us, ain’t the way we talk, nor should it be. The poem shows us that form doesn’t limit, that there’s freedom in the fetters. One of the potential consequences of the Like zeitgeist is that it makes a selfie of the free verse lyric. By celebrating our individuality, we all risk sounding the same. Stallings would have us remember, “It’s unlikely Like does diddly,” before we like ourselves to death.

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In “Denouement,” a Dickinson-haunted ballad ostensibly about knitting, Stallings says, “All I’ve accomplished, all, / Is to untangle a wine-dark skein / And coil it into a ball.” This act of untangling and re-tangling is the task of all poetry, but especially formal poetry: to take the complex matter of a life, a mythology, an afternoon, a refugee crisis, and make it tangible through taut language. Poetry, fastidious monster that she is, has always helped to lead us “out of the labyrinth / Through which all heroes travel.” Like itself is a labyrinth, an archive, a time capsule, a catalogue of metaphor and formal ingenuity. Quiet, utterly chasmic, there’s nothing quite like it. The denouement of “Denouement” epitomizes the rigor of Like, and the master craft of A.E. Stallings:

Out of the complicated,
Roll the smooth, round One,
So when it drops out of your lap
It brightly comes undone,

Leaping over the floor
Like swift ships outward-bound,
Unfurling the catastrophe
That aches to be rewound.