Theory of Orange by Rachel Simon

Pavement Saw Press, 2007
Review by Metta Sáma

“Free association is or “Everything that irritates us about others, leads us to understanding ourselves.”: a review of Rachel Simon’s Theory of Orange”
–Metta Sáma

Rachel Simon’s debut collection, Theory of Orange, 2005-2006 Transcontinental Poetry Award winner, judged by Dean Young, opens with the (false) promise of a “Recipe for Success”. Simon leaps from “eighth-grade embarrassment” to “a new apartment” and back again to “desired birth order[s]” and “compar[ing] childhoods”. This “recipe” seems to comment on poetry-making, book-making, as well as poet-making: “burn it in your cheeks for when doors/swing toward you faster than your arms can brace./Befriend lost children in the produce.” (3) The ironic title and attitude creates a light, self-conscious tone for the book.

A voice and brain-driven poet, Simon honors the frustrated leaps that permeate her world. In poems such as “When You’re Not Allowed To Daydream”, “Anxiety”, “Autobiography” and “Humid”, the jumps invite. In the prose poem “Daydream” she writes: “One can live for years without knowing the teaspoon is inaccurate. Call the bureau of weights and measurements. They’ll understand. In massage school I learned to rub a full belly in clockwise motion…” (1. Not only is the prose form a wonderful tool for these leaps, Simon’s humor has a mental, emotional, and psychological organization, creating a delightful and capricious symphony. In other poems free association works well for Simon’s tone, but don’t compel me to return to the lines and engage on a level beyond quirky, and often, predictable brain play.

Simon’s line, voice, and emotional range are most memorable in the poems “Rope” and “Present Tense”. These elegies to a friend who died young are heartbreaking because Simon gives way to the heart, the spirit and the body, as well as the mind. The lines are lumpy and the stanzas achingly untended, the language splinters, and I believe in all of the creaks. From “Rope”: “I can’t picture you opening the door of the hardware store/comparison shopping rope gauge, fingering/the textures, picking the blend that felt best rolled in your fist.” And ends: “Two years later,//two years in which I’ve pressed my face/into a pillowcase every night/I’m told you used a bedsheet, spun and knotted”. This poem honors the Simon seen earlier, the poet daring to take risks by moving from one idea/situation/image to the next, seamlessly and unpolished. Unlike the poems in which brain play is a short crutch, the shifts here feel entangled and real and powerful and muted in grief.

Many poems fail due to their floppy line and inert line breaks. There is no sense of identity in the lines as units, nor in the line breaks as tension and revelatory moons. While I enjoy free association, Simon’s thoughts on the page feel forged and lackluster. I’m more interested in seeing where these thoughts connect, instead of seeing that a poet can imagine queerly. The book, as a whole, feels staged, fretful, self-conscious, and anticipated. The poems often end abruptly or go on longer than necessary. Yet, Simon is a poet worth waiting for, precisely because she is self-conscious, fretful, stagey, predictable, and like any great young poet, willing to fall hard.

Metta Sáma is a book reviewer and poet. She previously reviewed Celia Homesley’s first book for Hercircle.