The Romance of Happy Workers, Anne Boyer’s first full-length collection of poems, shows us the private worlds of cowboys and communists, of painters and farmers, of scientists and mythologists, through the utterly bizarre lens of contemporary language.
The book starts off strong with the title poem, an eleven-page deconstruction of Westerners’ nostalgia/fetish for the USSR. Using a mixture of contemporary poetical language and Soviet-era tropes, Boyer gives a glance into the imagined life of the Russian wife of “Woody”:
I can’t put Siberia down
but can’t keep holding onto it.
His lips were a proletarian mediation
on May, a battle between pathogens,
just those ordinary fears of newlyweds,
reformist or revolutionary. Saved
from drowning, I straddled
Woody on the Bolshevik mattress
and proposed like a furnace in August.
Not able to unite in a common struggle,
the marriage ended, a Trotsky and a mouse.
The purpose of Boyer’s poems is not to “teach” readers about life in Soviet Russia or the Kansas Plains. Rather, her poems mine Othered landscapes for those cold, shiny nuggets of language that can only be provided by a dystopia. In “Home on the Range,” Boyer gives us this polished Midwestern gem:
Let’s pretend our heartland’s
green repair—
no John Deered plain,
just a pastoral Moo.
The Romance of Happy Workers makes ample use of “The Reference.” Boyer namedrops everyone from Carl Linnaeus and Rudy Diaz to Lazarus of Bethany. As this book is most definitely a book about poetry, Boyer does not shy away from directly engaging the Poetry Canon (that’s Canon with a capital, bolded, and triple-underlined C).
Boyer is quick to make reference to bigwigs like Browning (the Y-chromosomed one), Keats, and Donne. But Boyer’s references aren’t so much homages as they are starting off points for her own bow-shaped bite. In “Poundcast,” Boyer dresses Browning up only to dress him down: “Mr. Browning wanted a bright new velvet jacket, and art is (after all) only a prelude to piracy.” In “Ode O,” Keats is (literally) verbalized: “In the after sweat. Keatsly, my indolent. / My sod pet. Stanza catfights with strophe.” And the collection ends with “Valediction Forbidding Apocalypse,” a twenty-first century twist on Donne that half laments:
remarkable this world
drowned anyway—a mass
transiently—this product
of the porous …
Boyer doesn’t seem to want a place in the Keats Canon for herself. She wisely suspects that no one is going to let her into that musty old canon anyway. In “Ode I,” Boyer observes:
Cowering under the wings of great poets rather than to abitterness that I
am not appreciated, I enunciates with gusto, and as the great
poet enunciated,
there is no greater folly than to enunciate gusto like a great poet.
Erase great. Erase poet. Erase no. Erase the I who confessed
ever sweat
that summer, even when we did that with only those, I and O.
The Romance of Happy Workers leaves readers hoping that Boyer will continue with her efforts to lighten up the Canon—we want to see more room made for Boyer’s freshly, strangely, unabashed nuggets of language.