Book of No Ledge by Nance Van Winckel
LSU Press, 2016
Nance Van Winckel’s visual poems interrogate tradition while conjuring wonder and skepticism. After devouring the sold products of her unrequited love, an encyclopedia salesman, Van Winckel cuts, replaces, and supplements her owns truths into outdated books of knowledge. She crafts a new way of thinking without surrendering nostalgia. She confronts her childhood and includes insight of somebody who has unlearned truth. Now, the man who once represented incontrovertible fact is frightened of the older woman’s scissors and glue stick. He pleads:
Oh, you’re not certain that the white man helped the tribal people as well as I’ve so carefully outlined? . . . No, dear, the solar flares aren’t scary. Please don’t fret. . . . surely you won’t chop away that whole paragraph about the wonderful westward expansion and put some little poem in its place. A poem is not a fact, dear.
Van Winckel assures us that a poem can indeed be fact. Sometimes the lyric is all we have.
In our time of alternative facts, Van Winckel produces a soundtrack to our epistemological crisis. On a page of symbols, she writes her own definitions:
Symbolical: the fingers’ entrée.
The fingers’ limits. A mouth’s
boundaries. The drawn drapes,
the held breaths.Symbolical: the shelf full of wide-
eyed bisque dolls watching.
The courtyard’s teacups: white
leaves twittering on dead trees.
Van Winckel’s book of visual poems is layered with symbolic “mouth boundaries,” and the poems, like truths, require a bit of searching. The images slow me down; they allow me to relish each word. On brilliant pages of color, Van Winckel cuts and pastes old encyclopedia art and covers it with lyric. Her recolored maps and diagrams of environmental destruction remind us that while the earth and its commodities stay the same, they don’t need us. We are the killers. Snug in the corner of a diagram of dynamite instructions, Van Winckel commands us:
—recall your old darts & dashes
between black trees, just because
you believed watercress
bloomed up through the algae,
Did you expect the throb to throw a less delirious fit of
welcome?”
The dark yellows, browns, and grays act as portents for an unwelcomed apocalypse. Van Winckel’s reinvention of fact through lyric and color demand a criticism—an internal investigation of how we know what we know, and can we trust it?
Tanner Lee lives in Ogden, Utah, and studies at Weber State University. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, Glass, The Comstock Review, Bitterzoet, FRiGG Mag, and Lost Sparrow Press. He is an assistant blog manager at The Blueshift Journal. Find him on twitter @heytannerlee.