Etym(bi)ology

Liz Waldner

There are some books that just make you want to tear the eyes from your head, roast them with red peppers, and serve the whole mess up to your unsuspecting dinner party guests, because what will ultimately happen to them is better than turning even one more page in such a book. Etym(bi)ology is one of those books. It is, at times, physically painful to read, and yet you find yourself completely unable to stop, locked in the hope that if you turn the next page, you'll find something slightly more readable.

Waldner lets this hope live in you by name-dropping. It's quite obvious that she's read the greats, and will take as many opportunities as possible to let know know she's read them, both by dropping epigrams in here and there and by simply mentioning them. What Waldner utterly fails to have done, it seems, is to recognize what makes the greats great and assimilate any of it at all into her own work, which alternately takes the form of unpoetic political screed, unpoetic L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E work, and unpoetic boring prose chopped up into little lines to make it look more artistic.

"Ok, ok, I ask you. Is it not like the streets? If more women went out at night, it would be safer for women to go out at night. (If no men went out at night, it would be safer for women to go out at night. Argument ad hominem ad hominem.) So, if more flat-chested women refrained from affixing silicone bosoms, more flat-chested women could refrain from affixing silicone bosoms. (If no one were deciding the value of your being based on the size of your breasts, it would be safer for women to go out at night.)" (--"Etym(bi)ology")

I'm sure Catherine MacKinnon beamed as she read this. No poet, however, should even think of doing the same.

When that's a piece of the first so-called poem you read, it can't get any worse, right? The book has to improve somewhere along the way. Unfortunately, no.

"13. wd you be surprised to know I know many portions of many Emily Dickinson poems by heart?" (--"Melizalphabet")

Erm, judging by the work to be found in this volume... yes.

Half a star, because I ground my way through to the finish, for reasons I still do not quite understand; I guess my reasoning was that if I'm going to give a book this bad a review, then I should at least read every word therein, so as to be able to fully excoriate it.