Faceless
by Genni Gunn
Signature Editions, 2007
Reviewed by Aaron Tucker
As a central metaphor, “faces” are an interesting one to explore, ripe with echoes of surface and depth, geography and biology, semantics and connotations. Faceless explores these themes with vigor and scope, collecting almost every poetic angle on the subject of the face into a group of image driven, largely narrative pieces.
Yet, it is this grand sweeping look that often causes problems for the text as a whole: because the book is so cross cutting, it necessitates a heavy-handedness to get the message across quickly.
While some of the poems here are wonderfully subtle, hinging on the striking, original image, (“Voyages” and the “Hands” suite as examples) others hold the readers’ hand too much. In turn, the poems are often forced into a simplicity or an overt reveal that loses the intrigue built throughout the poetic line construction and compelling strings of images.
The poems themselves are presented as chopped up sentences, each line injected with white space. These gaps act as minute pauses, breathing spaces, and further compartmentalize the lines into smaller groups. This technique forces the chunks of sentences into new clusters while still maintaining a longish prose line. This gives the poems a flexibility that is able to connect a linear storyline while tightly controlling the pacing and emphasis of the lines (like line mini line breaks, further punctuation, within the lines themselves).
You can see these small breaks effectively at work in “4. Barroom Scene”:
“I once had a pair of dancing shoes XXX my pores alive
underfoot XXX across the city where there is still
darkness and sweat and bodies trying to lose them
selves XXX I am among the velvet flowers on the wall…”
This technique of small mid-line gaps feeds into the larger, more interesting theme of the work. While the book relentlessly pushes “faces” as its center (to the point of tiredness), the work is far more compelling slightly askew of that. This is a book about conjoining memories to landscapes, spaces to letters, fusing poetic techniques to linear and lyric storytelling.
The book is constantly being broken into smaller and smaller parts, through the borders of its chapters, to its poems, to the small groups of words. Through this lens, the work becomes less about the measure and exploration of faces, but about the features that comprise those facades, the wrinkles around the eyes or the slight scar that drags underneath a lip. The poems become a combination then of the general human features (i.e. eyes, lips, nose) and the personal facial landscape of an individual (i.e. the scar from a childhood fight, the hereditary birthmark).
The reader becomes involved more through the style of the work, the jiggering of the lines and words, than with the actual content (which is often a touch dramatic). The forth section, titled “Florence,” is a perfect example of this: this part of the book is bent on relaying the narrative of Florence, a woman with a paranoid personality disorder. But the reader is less interested in the woman herself and more intrigued by the description, the shifting of lines, of the blank spaces, of italics, in the constructing of the tiny pieces. There is little interest in stepping back and viewing the whole story and drawing some sort of larger message from that.
Where Gunn’s poems work best in this work is when they wed the geographical landscapes to the tiny fragments of narrative and allows those small parts to speak to the greater scopes of emotion, rather than attempting to explain loneliness or superficiality in one arcing, modernized morality tale.
Faceless is strongest when it strays from its title focal point and concentrates more on the pieces of its poetics, the images, the punctuation, the phrases. While the overarching narratives and themes are a bit too obvious at times, the poems are in parts startling and engaging, punchy with detail and resonance.
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