A Foreigner’s Conception
By Caroline Furr
Toho Publishing
$9.99
You can buy the book Here or Here.
Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan
“In this collection, Caroline Furr makes her mark on the poetry scene with her experience as a visual artist.”
How do we engage with art? How do we engage with society? Are we perpetually on the outside looking in? Can we have one foot firmly planted in the world, and one foot firmly planted in our own idiosyncratic landscape of observation? Can we take it all in? In her sui generis poetic debut, A Foreigner’s Conception, Caroline Furr explores these questions with surrealness, wit, and an intoxicating sense of wonder.
Being a visual artist, Furr often explores her own relationship to artists, artworks, and art movements. In “no exit,” she writes “a window opens at noon / the fauves arrive and spring through.” Using painterly and colorful language, she celebrates Fauvism’s moment in the artistic spotlight:
with a perspective only they knew
bright shades of red
went to their heads
and blue was no glue.
Perspective is as important in art as it is in poetry. The Fauvists saw the world in their way, created art, and then had to watch as Cubism took over the art world:
when cubism arrives
to inhabit twin facets
hat morph in boxes
brown boxes (oh no).
In succinct, precise language, Furr describes the displacement that art movements (artists) feel when they have been followed by a modern movement that rejects them. Not one for despairing pronouncements, she ends the poem with her uplifting and accepting outlook: “so it’s best to let them be / to do whatever it is they do.”
In “ode to a statue,” Furr explores a foreigner’s conception of a statue from Italy with the hypnotic whoosh of the lines: “we knew you were from Italy / land of fast cars and sewing machines / a place with principles on position and momentum.” With the language of Futurism, the reader can picture Furr, or even themselves, looking at this statue from a place that may or may not be familiar to them and engaging with art from perceiving the piece as well as its origins. In this poem, language is the key to decoding art, and conversely, art becomes the key to unlocking the power of language. In the poem, Futurism turns almost romantic with “it may have been just moviemaking / but such a lush country / with its dells and waterfall surprises.”
Furr’s sense of surrealism comes to the forefront in the prose poem “Little Known Facts” as she catalogs the various artistic representations and imaginings of the Buddha over the years.
The boy was always at horseplay
and since he was unable to adapt to the lotus
position, she [his mother] allowed him to spend afternoons at the
cinema where he could sit in comfort.
In Furr’s contemplation of the Buddha, he pursues a “new entertainment” of “reclusive wandering.” The Buddha finally ends up married to “a woman, much older it is said.” She ends the poem with the image of the outsider attempting to understand art, perhaps even life itself: “a wife would know a false beard, a foreigner / could only guess.”
Art can also be the site of gender politics. In “cornice—a horizontal projection.,” Furr opens with the penetrating and astute statement: “if politics displayed itself in architecture / so gender might.” She then compares the strong features of a building to strong qualities that can be found in women:
she creates a hasp
by erupting from beneath
and puts a roof over the sky
puffy pink penumbra
disguised as a girl.
This may be the most powerful, succinct poem in this chapbook full of such poems. This is a poem that builds a new paradigm in four stanzas, in thirteen lines.
In this collection, Furr also takes time to analyze human relationships where we are prone to hiding our flaws from our partners. The second stanza of “pioneering” contains the observation “so your scarf / what does that hide that she wants to know / see and touch.” The lovers create a world for themselves as only pioneers can. This tender poem concludes with the evocative stanza: “deep into the wood forming a bracket / it has turned to night now and we see better / as they stack it up together against bad weather.”
In this collection, Caroline Furr makes her mark on the poetry scene with her experience as a visual artist, her extraordinary uniqueness, her humor, and her keen powers of insight. I have never read a collection with the intellectual curiosity and glee for iconoclastic language that this chapbook displays. This work will stay with you for a long time. It will be a work you will return to as either an analysis of the world today or as an imaginative flight from it. This collection works on multiple levels that I am only slowly beginning to discover.
Sean Hanrahan is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collection Safer Behind Popcorn (read review here) (2019 Cajun Mutt Press) and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone Press) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). He is currently at work on several literary projects as well as teaching a chapbook class. He currently serves on the Moonstone Press Editorial Board, is head poetry editor for Toho, and is workshop instructor for Green Street Poetry.