![At the Intersection of Verbal and Visual: Collage.
A Contrary review by Shevi Berlinger

Donna Stonecipher builds The Cosmopolitan around the concept of inlay, the practice of adorning a material, such as wood, with other materials set into its surface. Stonecipher attempted inlay as a poetic structure “after a visit to the Metropolitan Museum’s furniture collection, during which [she] looked at the inlaid furniture, followed by an encounter in another museum with one of Joseph Cornell’s boxes, in which a postcard was hung by a pin.” The muscle and precision required to craft such objects shows in these poems, in which she discusses, with lightness and grace, such weighty topics as existentialism, romance, and urbanism.
The book comprises 22 inlays: each a prose poem of approximately 9-12 numbered segments, each with a quote hovering in its center taken from authors on Stonecipher’s expansive reading list. In her Note to the Reader she writes, “the inlaid quotes here are (mostly) autonomous within the surrounding poems,” and with that, the blueprints are rolled up and the poems unwind.
There is no end to imagery and inquiry in The Cosmopolitan. In particular, Stonecipher seems to play with the malleability of definitions: “The sky is a mind,” she writes in “Inlay 17 (John Ruskin)”; “But clouds are thoughts, thought the cloud . . . she thought on the last floor of the exhibition of cloud-pictures.” She moves from wide-ranging philosophical questions to acute detail: “I don’t know what to say about the reintroduction of foxes,” she writes in “Inlay 15 (Plato, from Aristotle, from Elaine Scarry),” whose central quote is “Yet, says Plato, it must be the case that the mind is a circle.”
Stonecipher always provides playful imagery, but in some poems, and especially in those moments of acute detail, readers may lack the context to understand her references. She quotes some well-known authors (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Claude Lévi-Strauss) while others may be more obscure (Elfriede Jelinke). Nevertheless, Stonecipher’s voice is direct and close, her thoughts cloaked in full, stretched sentences such as: “How many stacked-up peacock feathers does it take for the feeling of weightlessness to be overestimated?”
In prose both meaty—“Displacement, embankment: some words have liquid centers, like some chocolates”—and earthy—“The first day of August was followed by the first night of August”—she requires flexible readers who are willing to follow her without a distinct narrative arc.
Stonecipher wrote these poems, she tells us, "when I was thinking about my generation’s relationship to quotation and collage,” and The Cosmopolitan inspires one to think about what in Stonecipher’s experience was tender enough—or tough enough—to make it into her collage-like poems. If anything is certain, one element that survives her travels is the color blue. Be prepared for blue (cyan, ultramarine, azure) as you read, for the color makes appearances throughout. What is evident at the end of the book is the presence of an elastic, engaged mind. Filled with the vestiges of ideas Stonecipher has processed, a collage of lightning-sharp images and designs unfurls.
Shevi Berlinger was managing editor of Two Lines: World Writing in Translation. She teaches in New York and is at work on a book of poetry.
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© 2008 | all rights reserved
about us | xml feed | Contrary ® is a registered trademark of Contrary Magazine | donate $1 | contact us