Kiss/Hierarchy

by Alexandra van de Kamp

With her allusions to fine art and her own impeccable sense of color and texture, one might be tempted to say that Alexandra van de Kamp has a painter’s eye. But that cliché would overlook the exquisite temporal dramas she attends to with such relish: no, hers is a cinematographer’s vision, one deeply invested in what lies before and after, in and around and beneath her generous panoramas. Kiss/ Hierarchy is a book of romances and transformations. It evokes the passions that lead us into darkened theaters and from there into the intrigues and enchantments of great film. On one hand van de Kamp resuscitates the golden age of Hollywood, and on the other she imbues everything she studies, even mammograms and head colds, doll furniture and devoured tulips, with the glossy, resonating power of an auteur’s gaze.

—George David Clark, author of Reveille, winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize from the University of Arkansas Press, and editor-in-chief of 32Poems

Bees are “scribes of daylight,” a bird “lifts packages of wind,” and night is falling “diligently behind…pencil-long vegetables.” Even human teeth have something to do as they “dream their way through the language they are forced to chew.” This brilliant poet, in her second full-length collection, certainly has her hands full! Her Kiss/Hierarchy is so alive that it fills us with urges and longings to be workers in her meadow, reading and reading, so that we too might be transformed.

—Janet Kaplan, author of Dreamlife of a Philanthropist

Kiss/Hierarchy is one of the most original collections I’ve read in recent memory. These are poems first and foremost in love with language, imbued with music. But there are themes, too; however, there is humor in the doubt. Casual sadness in the great joy. And energy: so much of it! The work is unfailingly precise and memorable, but there’s also just enough coloring outside of the lines to keep the reader surprised, or a little troubled, the way you feel watching a gifted surgeon get creative with a scalpel—relieved at how beautifully it works, while still catching your breath, and always very intrigued.

—Laura Kasischke, recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and author of The Infinitesimals (2014)

I've been a fan of Alexandra van de Kamp's poems ever since I read The Park of Upside-Down Chairs, but, having been privileged to read Kiss/Hierarchy,I can now declare that I am a rabid fan. These confident and arresting poems all shine! Dear Alexandra, dear astounding collection of poems: Brava!

—Bill Yarrow, author of Blasphemer

Alexandra van de Kamp lives in San Antonio, TX, and is the Creative Writing Classes Program Director for Gemini Ink, a literary arts nonprofit. She also teaches intensive online poetry workshops through The Poetry Barn. She is the author of The Park of Upside-Down Chairs (CW Books 2010), and several chapbooks, including Dear Jean Seberg (2011), which won 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest, and A Liquid Bird inside the Night (Red Glass B ooks 2015). She has been published in numerous journals nationwide, such as Denver Quarterly, Connecticut Review, and The Cincinnati Review. For six years she lived in Madrid, Spain, where she co-founded and edited the bilingual journal, Terra Incognita. You may see more of her poetry and prose at: alexandravandekamp.blogspot.com

by Alexandra van de Kamp

Le Pont de Passy et la Tour Eiffel
—Marc Chagall (Oil on Canvas 1911)

Circus clown + rouge-cheeked whore =
the color scheme for this city scene.

It’s France, of course. Pass the soup,
sing yourself to sleep and watch a river

murder itself again and again, the waters
churning in their own tureen of sunset blood,

the eye sucked along as if dragged
down a drain—some internal plumbing

in the paint pulling you toward the back
of the scene, where The Eiffel Tower waits,

the faucet turning off and on
all this luminous action, all this Technicolor

speed. The evening a migraine of pinks
and greens, or a clementine smashed

into sheer pulp and sheen. At the embankment
stands Chagall’s blue and green horse—a flattened

gypsy caravan, a paisley toy in a child’s
hopeful hand. Lurid fairy tale + working-class

arrondissement = a train shuttering across
the metal bridge—its blue windows blind eyes

in a Peacock’s sleeping tail. I’m waiting
for the gangster girl clutching her purse

to appear, skidding on heels beneath
the buildings simmering in reddish-

dark shadow, by the fiery brick walls
lining the river. Instead, no people in sight.

Instead, there is just the sky:
a crime of light and desire, a gash

of dark blue that whitens
as it recedes towards the Tower.

Dear A—

Dear apple, dear angina,
dear after-thought, here is
another day that is not in August.
I write a friend who lives
in Berlin (not a city with an a
in it) and she doesn’t respond. I think
of all the strasses in Berlin, all the cafés
with their sterling silver spoons and white,
weighted cups. Where does a city
actually end? Where does New York exactly
give way to the suburbs and stone-scattered
fields surrounding it? Once, walking across
Spain, I took note of how the pavement
gradually increased as we approached
the city’s gates. Dear pashmina, dear
vintage year, it is so melodramatically green
this spring, I feel like I’m suffocating: insects
hatching eggs in the trees, the rain
dark as ink, the garden furniture stained
in cinematic regret. Where’s Gatsby
the summer my mother was an extra
in the film? Newport mansions
oozing afternoon light, roses clipped
to the precise parting of lips. She wasn’t allowed
to get a tan. Once the film was released,
I looked for her in a large party scene. Wearing a yellow,
lamp-shade dress, she was seated at a table,
barely visible through the dancing legs
of Redford and Mia Farrow.
Do plots end like cities, a little fed up
with themselves? But then some cities
are rosaries of tension. Dear abacus,
dear anxiety, thank god I am not
the boy in the Borges short story
who can never forget anything—his body
teetering on stone walls, his mind
tallying and tallying.

Bonjour Tristesse

for Jean Seberg

Summer is a slippery sorbet, flavored
in lemon, raspberry,
or some other fruit-splashed shade. Bonjour
to the clairvoyant, rippling day.
It is 93 degrees in the shade,
but, hey, the shadows appear tame—
each shaped like a champagne glass
filling with something dark
and thrilling, something you can’t
put a name to, although you have a feeling
it’s naming you, as it drinks
up your arms, as it climbs
into the rooms you hadn’t known
you kept inside of you. We are each
a portmanteau that life unpacks:
one compartment spilling out
into the voracious air, and then,
the next. You think your motives
are better than any other girl’s? You think
you can pinpoint the exact place
at which intentions
tenderly wait? The heart
is a continent slipping inside,
or a Riviera about to slide and slide
into the Mediterranean—slack-jawed
and patient. Play the crap tables, heroine,
roll the dice, your taffeta dress skimming
past the gaming tables—in one hand
your gold-lamé clutch. The body
a champagne glass time twists
between index finger and thumb,
a nimble, shattering thing
we hate to see undone.
How far would you go
to hold onto what you presumed
was your own? To own
a verb with such a decisive,
ominous groan. Summer is a tray
upon which a medley of delicacies
is delicately displayed: in the morning
café au lait, in the evening, the sky
a crystal-ball blue. And,
my heroine, which pleasures
will you fight for, which hors d’oeuvres
will you choose?