Review of Equilibrium by Tiana Clark

by katherine frain, poetry editor

To end before we begin, Tiana Clark’s Equilibrium is almost impossible to draw a conclusion about. It belongs to that rarest category of poetry collections – one where the name is impossible to extricate from not just one, but all poems. Equilibrium investigates the uneasy balance between contemporary and classical, experimental and expected, and what works and what doesn’t in a way that seesaws through the entire collection. It is a collection of courage, openness, and skinned knees both well-gained and well-deserved.

To begin with, the titular poem, Equilibrium. Nigh-impossible to reproduce here, the poem itself takes the shape of borders to a winding white river that becomes a symbol for the negative and invasive space of whiteness itself. This poem is a masterpiece, one of many among the work – Clark navigates the landscape of colorism with surprising and evocative imagery even as she accounts for the double-break within the line itself.

And yet, a similar piece later in the work, Flambeaux, tries to dance the same rhythm and ends up stumbling on the beat. Where the daringness of Equilibrium weights the scale to Clark’s credit, Flambeaux does not quite achieves the same grace, and its white spine does not hold the same effortless gravity. In some moments, the danger is the siren call of New Orleans imagery, which so many poets love and treat with an overly constant touch; meanwhile, the double-break of the line seems disconnecting at times unless handled like gossamer.

But perhaps this is the nature of many of Equilibrium’s experiments; one minute, they are in perfect balance, the next they are pushed a bit further than natural limits may allow.

In one poem, Clark rewrites Dickenson to accommodate Sandra Bland; in another, the equation of a circle becomes a poem about lynching. Both of these are incredible ideas, but only Dickinson seems to work in this context, while How to Find the Center of a Circle is again encumbered by the weight of the double-break. Equilibrium is full of admirable risk, and How to Find the Center of a Circle is an excellent legwork poem, one that requires a fair amount of thought and effort and bears fruit in proportion to those; it simply never leaps at us the way Sandra Bland does. Clark is calling, in Equilibrium, for an equilibrium of reading styles; Billy Collins’ famous hatred of students ‘beating poems with a hose’ juxtaposed against a classical academic sense of deliberateness.

And it’s one of the classical poems that tips the scale decisively in favor of Clark. Waking Up in the Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital is worth the cost of the book alone, and – if there is any justice in the world – will one day be immortalized as the flawless child of William Carlos Williams and Sylvia Plath. It has a sense of lyrical wonder and ease about it that entirely belies the poem’s subject in the best and most conscientious way possible, with images that will leave you hollowed out and breathless. Here, Clark seems to say, is where equilibrium lies; with the bold and the familiar mixed together as easily as blood and water, as rhyme perfectly executed and the subtle hints of racial strife in a simple “vanilla/black bean speckled crème brulee”.

How to end a review of a poetry book when the conclusion has been reached at the start? Simple: buy the book. It is worth studying in the same way scientific manuals are. Equilibrium has reached out to the unexpected, pulled it apart, and tried to put it back together – sometimes crookedly, sometimes perfect, and sometimes in ways that would make a Cubist blush. And yet every experiment is colored with a dedication that makes even the slips fascinating to watch and valuable to see. This is a book I’ll be picking up again.

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