On Ben Fama's collection, Aquarius Rising (UDP)

In astrology, one's "rising" sign is the public posture one takes with the world: the "face to meet the faces that you meet."A person with aquarius rising supposedly presents a public persona of brash independence, fervently unique, difficult to startle or shock — think of the quirky magical pixie girl of today's hipper rom-coms, i.e. Zoey Deschanel.

Ben Fama's first poem in his new chapbook, Aquarius Rising, titled "Girl," appears to be a series of poetic openings. It is all beginnings, a series of first lines, that implies but never delves into a text. In the poem's structure, it (unintentionally?) mirrors the 2004 Adam Sandler / Drew Barrymore rom-com vehicle, "50 first Dates." Each line connects only loosely to the next, if at all:

"I dreamed you wouldn't let me sleep in your bed

In a phone call they told me the poem was over

I was choking and there was no one to wave to

Beneath me was the sea

A stranger came out of the water"

It might tell the story of a relationship, or might be a fruitful poetic exercise — certainly, it presents a persona of mannered poetics. Fama's chapbook contains ten such poems, all of them striving for a unique voice, with titles that gesture toward astrological signs. They are relatively light, more clever than daring, as in the opening lines of the poem "Tauromachy": "Women of Odessa / I come bearing .gifs" There is a tinge throughout the collection of melancholy, “I don't know / anyone who / ever died / it makes / being human harder.”  But that hardly matters. The poems evoke best a sort of intellectual and poetic intrigue; or, to put it more simply: enjoyment. They generate a kind of loose logic, as a dream structured by the links of language connection (some musical, some semi-logical or sensible). Fama mixes traditional lyricism with vocal, contemporary declarations and phrases:

“To live a serious life
that's a fucked up thing
I would have to rent out a cabin
beneath terrible angels [. . .]”

As with his poem of beginnings, through his jolts of casual phrases, Fama never gives in completely to the seriousness of his poetry. He implicates the medium, and the wells from which he draws, in this un-seriousness. The poems sometimes seem to turn back on our enjoyment and accuse. Gently. Maybe knowingly and with a little nudge. They move into grave questions and out of them, back into a world full of confusion and odd ephemera:

“sometimes the world at midnight seems empty
like an empty room in a sad empty gallery

or the way a white horse
floating in the center of a lake is a full lake

my apartment at midnight is a collage
of wrapping paper and strange feelings

the world thrives on misunderstanding
a cloud full of moods for mature situations”