Origami Drama by Brooke Larson

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This slender volume (twenty-five pages) is one of the coolest things I've seen in some time. Published by Quarterly West and worth the $15 just to see what can be done with form.

What most of the poems in the collection do is be about the paper they are printed on. Ofttimes they are printed over colored lines, the colors instructing you as to what order you should fold the page in order to make it into the poem---"Paper Ball for Games" or "Paper Daggers" are two titles where this can be obvious with only the title to consider.

But the papers don't necessarily need to be folded. "Grease Catcher" has no fold lines---it just instructs you to "Rip this page out. Rip it out and place it on your / cutting board." This poem engages with its physical reality as ink on paper in a way I've never seen before.

That / above I'm a bit uncertain about. Most of the poems are fully justified so that the text can form a square, like origami paper, natch. It's part of the conceit and therefore cool, but it does make the line breaks seem more like prose than like line breaks, and some of the poems ramble on a bit in order to fill the space. But that's part of the difficulty of what's been attempted here and what's being attempted here is too dang cool not to celebrate regardless.

The final poem, "Written Concern," is (like some of its precedents) less obviously concerned with its physical reality. (A mode of poetry Larson has pushed to extremes.) But it might be the most emotionally raw poem in the collection. I certainly was moved by it.

I think you might be too.