Ceive by B. K. Fischer (review)

Reviewed by: Ceive by B. K. Fischer Kathryn Weld (bio) ceive B. K. Fischer BOA Editions Ltd. https://www.boaeditions.org/products/ceive 120 pages; Print, $17.00 "Gather your wits, girlie. You sit up on a pile of towels by the defunct sump pump—dead quiet, no hum." Thus begins B. K. Fischer's Ceive, a verse novella. Who is speaking? To whom? The omniscient narrator is witness to her own story, and the perspective is disorienting. The ground shifts—and would it not shift, continually, if the world were to flood for days, weeks, months, and all solid ground were to disappear? Would one not talk to oneself? We discover [End Page 105] the narrator-protagonist to be a suburban mother named Val, survivor of an apocalyptic flood, who boards a container ship bound for Newfoundland. Power stations blow, children go missing; bridges and tunnels collapse. Fischer's spare language in "Recapitulate" frames a harrowing scene: At your feet, jackets. Jackets with kidsin them—face up or down. You reacheddown the way you reached at her birth before the birth was done, came upwith hands like that. Wind knockedback: clouds churning over the river.Frame: Trumpet case. Funnel cloud. Fischer has an uncanny ability to orient the reader visually. Over and over again in reading Ceive, I tumbled over tonal echoes of the work of old masters. For example, "Recapitulate" for me summons Pieter Bruegel's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, memorialized by W. H. Auden in "Musée des Beaux Arts." Perhaps this resonance is caused by the neutral pallet, or by the relentlessness of the forward motion of the narrative, despite the chaos. The effect is to highlight the terror of our own societal indifference to the impending climate disaster. Rescued from her cellar by Roy, the UPS man, "Get up, he says. There's a ship that's getting out." Val, after a frank assessment—the fifty-fourth adult on board, unable to bear more children—is accepted as passenger and crew member. She is given responsibility for Crispin, "greasy and delicate with downy limbs," a boy with autism who can do mathematics. First and foremost, Ceive reimagines the biblical narrative of the flood in the present day. Indirectly, Ceive engages with the long tradition of seafaring epics. It is impossible not to hear the echo of a canon that includes The Odyssey, The Icelandic Sagas, Moby-Dick. More overtly, Ceive is in visible conversation with a substantive collection of contemporary writers. For example, Fischer intentionally channels Pound's translation of The Seafarer (1911), its text having been "atomized, and dispersed throughout the book." In addition, Fischer acknowledges the textual influences of Genesis and Shakespeare and the thematic influence of Timothy Morton's Dark Ecology [End Page 106] (2016). Individual poems borrow lines or details from authors such as Ingrid Lilly, Elizabeth Kolbert, Kurt Schwitter, Darcy Steinke, and Hélène Cixous. The text is further energized by visual references to artists like Joan Miro and Leonardo da Vinci. The cumulative effect of all this borrowing is dynamic. The created world vibrates on multiple levels—etymological, ecological, pictorial. The italicized inserted texts are undifferentiated from italicized speech. The effect is almost like collage. Initially, when a reader is trying to distinguish voices, this is disorienting. On a second reading I found it exciting. In Val's world, everything—people, objects, even language itself—seems to be articulate. The sentient individual finds herself eavesdropping as a multitude of intelligent voices weighs in. What a privilege to wake to such a world. At the same time, how arduous. Here is an example from the prose poem "N 40° 51'/W 73° 57'": now it's just the catenary, the swoop of its unloaded cables after the deck dropped. Dire sea surge. The boy looks up and squints, then shouts, find the area under the shaded region. You pull him under the landing, try to get him to sit down. He swings his Nike satchel and dumps out his things, commingled souvenirs and prophesies, lines them up on the deck—a Florida magnet, a tiny Eiffel Tower, a blue spiky massage ball...

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