Floating is Everything
Sheryda Warrener, 87 pgs, Nightwood Editions, nightwoodeditions.com, $18.95
Sheryda Warrener’s latest outing explores everything from the poolside to the distant universe and back again, bending the local into a kind of outer-space. Floating is Everything pulls its reader from Asia to Eastern Europe, from Pluto to Florida — always with an impression of autobiography, but never with any kind of cohesive narrative. A persistent yearning drifts behind these poems — though this is the only theme that connects them.
This is not to say that the small collection does not have its memorable gems. “Long Distance” is a thrilling 10-part reflection on Yuri Gagarin and Valeri Polyakov, notable cosmonauts from the 1960s, figuring them as ghosts, guides, or echoes in Warrener’s ambivalent drama. “Trace Object” is a similar burst to life, documenting the intangible imprint left on a going-through-the-motions family by its deceased patriarch, where “absence accumulates” and “cigar smoke hangs [in the] blue bruised air.” Warrener’s narrative strength is a decisive force within her longer poems, but one loses his sense of direction in the space between them. Perhaps this is the point — floating is everything, after all. (Joel W. Vaughan)