Shawn's review of Spahr

Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs is a poetic account of the events of the September 11, 2001 attacks and those surrounding the March 2003 United States-led invasion of Iraq.

As her work’s title implies, Spahr’s scope is vast: her 75-page book is comprised of only two poems—one written after September 11 and another written continuously from November 30, 2002 until March 27, 2003, a week after the March 19 bombing of Iraq.

One thing that is striking throughout the book is the poetry’s lack of any real political agenda. One can tell that Spahr is opposed to the war, but her message is less political and more humanist.

Throughout the book, Spahr’s tone is almost hypnotic, with each line’s meditation marching inevitably closer to war. Perhaps most striking about the meditative quality of Spahr’s book, though, is her constant repetition of lines, words, and phrases to bring about this quality. Take, for example, these few lines from her “Poem Written After September 11/2001:” “as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and / the space around the hands in and out / as everyone breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands and the space of the room in and out…” (5).

This continues for a couple pages until the phrases grow and connect ever so gradually as to eventually include words such as “troposphere.” We see in Spahr’s ever-widening picture a connectedness that becomes a theme throughout the book. The world, in Spahr’s eyes, is smaller than most people care to believe; it is a world in which every action affects everybody since the human race is connected by something as simple as the space between them.

Spahr’s poem “Poem Written from November 30/2002 to March 27/2003,”—which comprises most of the book—is written as a sort of journal entry on a somewhat daily basis. She includes happenings from the lead up to war, pop-culture references, and news of protests—all connected by their being reported on the same news network. It is here that Spahr’s poetry gets less like poetry in the traditional sense.

If there is something that Spahr’s poems are lacking, it’s a consistent deliberateness. For those used to more conventional poetry, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs will be a leap.

Spahr’s poetry is less cerebral and more spontaneous than other poets’ work—something that is perhaps most evident in “Poem Written from November 30/2002 to March 27/2003” which serves more as a diary composed of several poems. This is in no way deleterious to the effect of Spahr’s work, it just may be a hurdle for some to get over.

One of Spahr’s main objectives with This Connection of Everyone with Lungs is to show the, well, connectedness of humanity. By meshing together times in which celebrities make headlines next to troop deployments with an almost Zen-like concentration on the space that touches everything in our world, Spahr is able to effectively portray our small world.