“Order by Absence”: On Carrie Olivia Adams' "Be the thing of memory"

Carrie Olivia Adams | Be the thing of memory | Tolsun Books | 2021 | 88 Pages

Carrie Olivia Adams’ newest collection is not your mother’s book of erasures. In Be the thing of memory Lady Tolstoy’s biography converses with a dated girl scout handbook, a list of sentences from a hearing test, and writings by Alice Magaw, “the mother of anesthesia.” Across four long poems, Adams reveals the kinship between these historic documents through practices of writing-into, arrangement, and redaction of found text. This contemporary book structure reveals a dialogue about methods of departure, for leaving and being left, across place and time.

Among the pleasures of Be the thing of memory is the gradual revealing of shared syntax and subject matter among documents from such disparate contexts and periods. In the first section, “Daughter of a Tree Farm,” fragmented structures recall the methods of note-takers and late-night copyeditors like Tolstaya and Alice Magaw, who both married young and later separated from their husbands, and whose legacies remain little-known:

There was always something in our arms. Yet, on the other hand, the method of life, sinking extraordinarily.

Across the collection, the quiet buzzing of recurring motifs—bees, strangers, sutures, silence, sleep and its absence, human limbs and the several limbs that are trees—sound from one distant context to the next. Perhaps among the goals of Be the thing of memory is the plucking of hidden stitches that structure these documents and which Adams suggests, are also histories of leaving. 

In the first section, riffing on text from Sophia Tolstoya’s biography, the poem calls out: 

With us, every new idea or the carrying of some instance wrote upon me the idea of history … I also make war. And peace, when I am carried away.

And in the final poem, “Proficiency Badges,” the revised girl scout handbook replies:

Dear man of war, how to I dictate order by absence?

One element that at first felt missing from a project on erasure were visual references to original documents—to paper quality, texture, font and font. As a creative process, “erasure” might traditionally suggest the dimming of an original voice to make way for the presence of the contemporary author, but Adams’ project seems invested in something quite different. In each poem, Be the thing of memory reflects on the physical gestures of collation, redaction, and expansion that the book itself participates in, illustrating Adams’ engagement with the material of text through language:

‘Obscure the word rather than show it / show by obscuring / obscure by showing—’

’I set myself to sun to make a language of curtain movements and slat peering…. From ash we began to fashion the tools of the structure. I am hammer to your nail.’

‘It’s not the silence of sleep but the throws and threads of a million lost conversations.’

And perhaps the absence of material erasure signals an intentional shift in this tradition. Adams’ body of work also includes image-texts, video poems, and artists books that unfold into maps. Throughout Be the thing of memory, speech itself is a material wound around the spindle of several forms—the Question-and-Answer sheet, the lineated poem, prose blocks without punctuation—which emphasize the role of speech-as-sound, and recall Adams’ practices across disciplines. The force of Adams’ voice serves as our consistent guide across each form:

I am going to read you a short story and then I will ask you some questions about it Are you ready?

Alternately forceful and playful, the subtle cadence of fairytale tropes across Be the thing of memory also gesture towards erasure as a form of retelling; each poem draws forward a deeper conversation about narrative via immersion in the language of diaries, handbooks, cold operations, and the voices of several guides across time:

‘There is a bit of Alice in everything. If I had a daughter, I would tell her to always know what kind of story she’s in.’

what’s the point of all this glass if there aren’t eyes for it’

Adams’ is a book that asks us to reconsider what we know about the results of “finding” text. Through her rendering of archival materials, she asks us to count the stitches that act as moments of recognition between one nearly-forgotten document and another:

When the stranger says, I just had to tell you, I know that I did something right, that the bottle left the shore and was picked up by a small girl in a canoe on an inland pond. We are both saying—hello out there. Hello.

This web of motifs suggest that Adams’ application of historic material is not simply a gesture of revealing or even “peeling back” the original, but that the poems in Be the thing of memory are updating archival documents for today’s audience—Forest fires and burning fields. Boxes of snow. How to marry men much older and then how to leave them:

I have been given arms, which is to say that I have been given a how-to, an instruction manual for walking deep into the woods, calling out to you again and again as my voice fades to smaller and smaller. And then, run. Be the thing of memory. That phantom we will both debate.

In Be the thing of memory a group of archived voices become Adams’ singular voice, and in doing so, are returned to us in a form we can decipher, are strangers to each other no more.