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Jessica Smith's "Organic Furniture Cellar" is a choose-your-own-poetry-adventure. Readers are challenged to set aside their commitment to linear, left to right, top down reading and invited to (re)arrange texts of their own choosing. Words fan out across the pages in clusters, sometimes trailing letters behind, creating tracks of meaning chosen, by chance and desire, by the reader.
The poems take their titles from places -- cities, streets, geographical landmarks -- sites of personal history, marking events which the reader co-authors through an ordering of language. Smith reminds us that memory is unordered and agile. The reader creates fragments of stories brought to mind by sense experiences. We piece together narrative lines through the collage of memory. Memory burrows its own winding path of logic. This path exists, sometimes invisibly, beneath a surface of conventional rules of reading. As the reader steps into the role of co-creator, she carves her own paths of meaning, collecting bits of language and assembling them into images of story. This invitation to playful participation becomes a mandate as it becomes more and more difficult to find meaning reading in a left to right trajectory.
Excerpted from a review by Ellen Baxt in BOOG CITY (NY).
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