The Book of a Hundred Hands (Kuhl House Poets) by Cole Swensen

The Book of a Hundred Hands (Kuhl House Poets) Reviews

• 
  Lightsey

  Sad to put this one away. . .
  
  On second read-through, I'm thinking the hands are not symbolic of anything, but are more a site at which to gather images or strong verbs, mostly suggestive of human relations to the world. . . Swensen conceives of the hands as not symbols of the mind's interaction with reality, but as actually a sort of mind themselves, a sort of subjectivity. I'd recommend this book to dancers--and everyone else, really, but physical people especially--because it does create an embodied language experience. . . ech, that phrase is the exact opposite of what I'm talking about--a visceral language that feels like moving feels.
  
  *
  
  I read The Age of Glass earlier this year. . . Two things I notice about Swensen (other than my general liking for her projects). One is that she's very fond of a device that, so far as I know, does not have a name. She sets you up to expect enjambment, then switches settings and often grammar entirely, so that your brain is simultaneously reading this new line and wondering how the previous line "ought" to have ended. Very tricky. Second is that her books read like the whittled remains of much larger tomes. Everything feels incomplete--in a challenging yet poignant way. Sometimes it all feels too incomplete for me. But I trust Swensen even when I don't entirely follow her.
  So. . . having finished the book, I still like the style, but find myself pretty puzzled about the "hands". I can't get what she's after. . . sometimes the hands just feel like an organizing conceit, sometimes a symbol collapsing under its own symbolic weight. . . I'm going to reread.
• 
  Matthew M.

  “In an x-ray you can tell.” Cole Swenson’s recent collection of poems, though we might call it a series of specific engagements and investigations, holds true the line from “Fingertips”: “Attention can hone / down that close, and then the bone flattens out / just a bit / and you can hear / what it hears, and you can hear / it.” This attention referenced, is the outward looking toward the anatomy of the hands, its spaces and curves, i.e. it’s availability to be seen through an imaginative lens, or transformed and stamped with history and conjecture. With The Book of a Hundred Hands, we have what in contemporary poetry we may call poetry of the “project.” In other words, as the acknowledgement page highlights, the books title comes from one George B. Bridgman who once authored a book of the same name some 35 odd years ago. Swenson’s poems, while also taking sustenance from other sources as well, is clear-eyed in its directive toward opacity, and the fundamental fragmentation that once came to define our post-modern moments. While fragmentation may serve as an interesting literary technique, Swenson’s employment of the fragment is idiosyncratic, and achieves its greatest effect through the forms the poems take on an individual basis. They are rife with ruptures in syntax, and enlarge then break with the discourses of science and art, while line breaks and spacing provide alterations in diction, etc. Perhaps the act of appropriation needs the white space the poems’ contain. Perhaps the page can be read as a canvas, not unlike a painter, where the hand testifies its social output. From “The Hand As Historical”:
  
  A fossil hides time – and thus hides from itself, that else
  is the human compass
  is the hand – and sows
  a composite home, its only hour,
  and that, in fact, the graph
  is a palm – just look what falls within
  
  This book engages in its subject, which is both about hands and not. The paradox of this is seemingly located in the non-linear and non-narrative structure that locates the poems by way of a mind interested not so much in eschewing meaning, but in the prospect of collaboration (appropriation), which in the end is finally a physical and mental exchange, and complements the activity of reading as affirmative social act. Do poems say “yes” to darkness? The poem for Swenson is here established as an eye that traces the hand through its constant migrations, transfigurations. If opacity must be swallowed, as we swallow our pills for instant bliss, Swenson’s poems declare the “hand is an island / oddly endless; / we are it.” Think of a blind person’s reliance on touch as both a fact of living and sensation. This too might “require silence,” and as Swenson investigates, the hand circles the surface and gropes toward the light, not of metaphoric relief and misdirection, but a surface that altogether evades our vision.
  
• 
  Paula Koneazny

  The book of a hundred hands is a compendium, a thorough and thoroughly poetic examination of the human hand. The poems are organized into sections, which give an idea of Swenson’s approach to the subject: The History of the Hand, Positions of the Hand, Professions of the Hand, Representations of the Hand, The Anatomy of the Hand, American Sign Language, Shadow Puppets, A Manual of Gesture: Public Speaking for the Gentleman (1879), and Paintings of Possible Hands. A few of my favorite lines from these 100 poems (some of which border on the aphoristic) would include the following:
  (7) “the mind/ with its boundless arboretum of neural withins”
  (23) “As it carves its world/ from the aerodrome of nerve and dream”
  (39) “the term “pillows of the wrist” was engraved upon the lintel/ through which one enters/ the deeply placed”
  (55) “Photographs have a way of implying that it was a little cold that day, or that we live like pets in the laps of everyone who wanted something else.”
  (94) “They say there’s a past/ that’s simple as opposed to perfect.”
  (103) “The hand writes in the air; the bird stays there.”
  (120) “There is no door/ to the room; it has been replaced by a room.”
  
• 
  Caitlin

  You know, I like hands.
• 
  Anna

  I've been reading this one for at least a year and haven't been able to finish it. It's about hands. There are lots of them.
• 
  Anthony

  i adored just about every page of this
• 
  M.W.P.M.

  If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest.
  

  - Wittgenstein, On Certainty

  
  
  The Book of a Hundred Hands is divided into nine parts: "The History of the Hand", "Positions of the Hand", "Professions of the Hand", "Representations of the Hand", "The Anatomy of the Hand", "American Sign Language", "Shadow Puppets", "A Manual of Gestures: Public Speaking for the Gentleman (1879)", and "Paintings of Possible Hands"...
  
  From "The History of the Hand"...
  
  

  Skip a stone across a water. Your eye will unfurl you, counting
  and counted on whoever also
  

  learned the names (then matched them

  
  to a face of other lighted surface). What do you have in your
  
  You'd think that now, with all this space within, they'd be less empty now
  
  you'll remember
  
  them all.
  

  - A History of the Hand, pg. 14

  
  
  From "Positions of the Hand"...
  
  

  As it carves its world
  from the aerodrome of nerve and dream, additional dimensions and projections
  of the thing, enormous, internal
  and verdant
  becomes this
  

  acreage paced, this mile after mile

  
  that the hand each day travels as it waves,
  or covers a yawn, or sweeps, or puts down
  a baton. The orchestra conductor wears an odometer
  instead of a watch.
  

  - Traveling, pg. 23

  
  
  From "Professions of the Hand"...
  
  

  Chart it on a staff, both the shape of the note and that of the hand
  of the music therein. Marinetti wrote a play
  composed entirely of hands
  that waved above a sheet when the lights came on.
  
  In another (whose?) a mime stood alone on stage
  and when the lights went down, all that remained were his hands gloved
  in something that glows in the dark. Such as will not spread in the dark
  
  such as five years. Arrange them as you like.
  

  - The Theatre of the Hand, pg. 35

  
  
  From "Representations of the Hand"...
  
  

  As if the sun had hit
  
  the glazing
  
  slips
  as if
  
  there are days it all goes right
  
  for instance:
  There's a greenhouse just out of sight.
  All I can see is a greenhouse, the glass in the sun, the green
  is somewhere else. The hand arches over
  the head of the child and floats down. The hand is planned
  as a perfect inversion of the head. Child and mine, a building of eyes. You can see
  through the hand or think you can
  to the flower of the brain, but all along it's the hand
  that's blooming, and the child is incidental, or at least not central to the scene.
  

  - The Hands Testify, pg. 50

  
  
  From "The Anatomy of the Hand"...
  
  

  Lattice into swallow, the fingers built in shallows; they are beyond
  and so the creases do not penetrate. They are beyond. Enclosed
  in differing lengths. Bevel. Apex of the knuckle, which
  point it never reaches, there being others farther on.
  

  - Fingers I, pg. 63

  
  
  From "American Sign Language"...
  
  

  Sculpts. Just look at these neighbours. Who sees with the fingers
  sees these things together. I once built a neighbour of light.
  We used to read by his skin, the whole town, reciting, "Repeat after
  
  until we could decipher branches signing in the storm and
  long past the fields now speaking, walking on his hands out of town.
  

  - The Manual Alphabet, pg. 84

  
  
  From "Shadow Puppets"...
  
  

  The latest work in shadow puppets is being done on verbs. Make the form
  of a soar, of a veer. Make the tense clear. Distinguish the past perfect from
  the simple past. Neither was. And on into conditionals. Would have
  found, etc. Would have gone
  myself, but I wasn't home. Birdwatchers often use sign language because,
  though birds are fond of the human voice, they are downright hypnotized
  by the swaying hands and will walk right into them.
  

  - Advances in the Form, pg. 105

  
  
  From "A Manual of Gestures: Public Speaking for the Gentleman (1879)"...
  
  

  is highly recommended for dissuading ghosts (Oh! what is!
  this darkness! etc.
  coming from the east. The hand goes one way, and the glance,
  another, by natural magnetism shattered the challenge
  and wept in gesture for nought (here look slightly up) "Be gone!" Begin
  by sweeping the hand around from the back
  in a wide arc; you can, in a way, imply everything in sight.
  

  - Right Hand Ascending Oblique Vertical, pg. 112

  
  
  From "Paintings of Possible Hands"...
  
  

  Nested dolls.
  Heart, hand, and larger churches
  forget to intend anything beyond. There is no door
  to the room; it has been replaced by a room.
  

  - Auguste Rodin, Cathedral, 1908, pg. 120
• 
  Aloysiusi Lionel

  The 125 poems in this collection, published in 2005 by the University of Iowa Press, explore the unimaginable spectrum of the human hand. With its seductive lyricism, each poem provides the hand with metaphorical and metaphysical significations only an observant eye and prolific poet could intelligently and beautifully express. The geometry of the hand, as well as the playful roles of fingers, nerves, skin and skeleton, assured a reader of the exuberance of individuation. An eye that looks is overwhelmed by an eye that stares, examines and never blinks, for the latter magnifies whatever triviality there is in the hand and develops insights suprisingly profound. In the anatomy of our consciousness, there's the hand that protects, signals and caresses, and there's a poet, in the name of Cole Swensen, who extracted her every wit and sweat and reached all of aesthetics' probable ends (as if it has its ends) to reiterate the dominion of poetry in the literary arts in terms of impact and resonance. And these hands of mine, after I read this book, are what I will ever treasure, for they are more than flesh and bone. Crevices, craters and imperfections can bring forth what my soul, in its most unnerving moments, yields to and yearns for. How wonderful it is, that a hand functioning in gripping and shaping is such a symbol for the desire to transcend from circumstances, a vehicle for poetic passion, and a path to the robustness of the imagination. Indeed, this body part deserves intimacy and contemplation.
• 
  Janée Baugher

  Beautiful, deep-imagery collection of thematic poems. Such leaps and turns, with a smart chronology. Ekphrastic poems, as well as ones on history, anatomy, etc. Very smart. Read this, especially if you're studying the deep-image and want to see how seamless "leaping poetry" can be.
• 
  some mushroom dude

  loved spending time with this
• 
  Kit

  interesting but mostly a little beyond me. I would like to read more Swensen though.