The title of Amy De'Ath’s Not a Force of Nature is, at first, an innocent phrase. The book opens by putting what is proper up against the man-made, opposing the “force of nature” to what has been produced, materially, by human hands. What matters is not that the people doing the constructing are especially good or bad, but they are people, “who could be proletarians, farmers, queers, or even homeowners or none of those but not nothing.” De'Ath, at first, seems to be interested in what is made, not begotten, and in what then becomes property.

Naturally enough, though, this makes the phrase take on a bit of gender, which messes up its poles. If a woman is a force of nature, say, other people might, all the same, have had a hand in her construction, what a later poem describes as “the shoe-horned harmoniousness of gendered being.” The speaker finds herself forced to theorize:

This compulsion to conceptualize doesn’t stick around too long, though; by the end of the stanza, the speaker has left even herself behind:

The book moves rapidly through its references, working under the assumption that the conditions determining whatever one line describes might well have changed by the time they get enjambed. Like the phrase “force of nature,” which falls apart by referring at once to hurricanes and Helens, De'Ath’s own words are often subject to their homonyms. When she lands on “options,” for example, the word quickly takes on its reference to commodities futures trading:

In the second section, “Eight Love Sonnets,” the speaker articulates her desire, not for the lover, but for her own place among the aesthetes:

De'Ath puts this ironized longing to be sensuous up against political engagement. By the third section, “Eight Work Emails”—also sonnets, of a sort (14 lines, if the address and sign-off were removed)—the repressive collocations of business communication take the form of love, even while lovability becomes measurable by workplace rulers. “Dear Father Christmas” stages a performance evaluation:

Each poem in this section has the same addressee and sender, as if notes-to-self, or as if the relationship between colleagues has reduced all parties to some flattening identification (an employee is an employee is an employee … ). And with this section, something shifts; the book descends into a new form, one more fragmented. The linguistic implications that, in early poems, created a confident semantic slippage now refuse to hold, such that “Condominiums and condoms are the / same thing.” This same poem, “Unconditional,” goes on:

At first, I follow an easy throughline, that poets of conscience might, say, eschew “natural light” in favor of a more comradely fluorescent. When we get to Palestine, though, I find a poem still finding out what poems might contain. Gaza here is not the poem’s sublime horror, witnessed from a distance, nor does the poem want to shrug at genocide. Instead, it turns to the earnest attempt to answer its own question, how a poem could “collect the working- / class,” who turn out to be “only my legs against all the wind / in the world, muscle that knowing at all / took possession of nothing.” I wish I could quote all of “Unconditional,” in fact, where the the baser question of ownership, and what it affords, turns into this more figurative idea of collective “possession,” generating, finally, a we who “were all jobless on the back slope, / simple and depopulated.” The problem of the poem’s class is not one of “content”—riot or roses, tenants or trees—nor of some political-aesthetic affordance of “form.” I’m reminded of the book's opening again, the dependence on “actual emboldened people.” A poem does not work, or own a factory, or otherwise do the things that might give it a class, but it is made up of a classed society’s language.

In “Institutional Critique,” a longer poem towards the book’s end, De'Ath explicitly connects the question of nature to the aesthetic category of the sublime, by way of a critique of Edward Burtynsky’s efforts to document the beauty of man-made ecological disasters. This brings us back to the question of a poem’s responsibility:

Sianne Ngai’s idea of “stuplimity” starts with Stein’s Making of Americans, which Leo Stein (Gertrude’s brother) called stupid. This reading leads to the central differences between Ngai’s new aesthetic category and the old “sublimity”: the objects of inquiry themselves. She is not interested in the awe-inspiring terror of the natural landscape, however bound to or freed from a painting’s dimensions, nor the war, reflected on by German philosophers at a safe remove, but in aesthetic objects like Stein’s overwhelming novel. Ngai argues that we need this category not just because “Kant limits his concept of the sublime to ‘rude nature,’ and explicitly bars it from being applied to products of art ‘where human purpose determines the form and the size,’” and not just because the sublime is a quality of the viewer’s mind, not of the thing she looks at; she needs, instead, a concept that might account for the misery of language itself. Phrases like Stein’s “bottom natures” pose, in Ngai’s formulation, “a more complex problem of the self’s relationship to a particular kind of linguistic difference that does not yet have a concept assigned to it”; “stuplimity drags us downward into the realm of words rather than transporting us upward toward an unrepresentable divine.”

I turn to Ngai not just because her word shows up in De'Ath’s poem, and not just because De'Ath, like Ngai, is working with material that we know to be fabricated, made by human labor. Ngai’s emphasis is not on the unnatural, in the end, but on the sensual, and on what people make while stuck in linguistic mud. Not a Force of Nature refigures “craft” as something language might be forced to endure, and the poet as the person tasked with putting language through a diligent, discursive propulsion. I wanted, at first, to describe this movement with a stone-skipping metaphor—where the poem, like a flat rock, creates temporary structures of tension wherever it lands—but it’s not so breezy or pastoral as all that, no flick of the wrist. The subject constructed by each poem, the person both compelled and compelling, is tasked with rearranging, in speech, all manner of forces.

The opening four poems—“Not a Force of Nature,” “That Well of Tears is Mine,” “Force of Nature,” and “Hope It’s Not Important” (unlike the sections to come, these poems are left to fend for themselves without a section title)—function as an introduction to the book’s harried way of making meaning, and to its collaging of the linguistic and emotional residue of various natural systems. In the second poem, De'Ath replaces the rose in Gertrude Stein’s oft-repeated tautology with social struggle:

The word “rose” skips over its reference to Stein (and, by skipping, eludes the question of equivalence), by way of an implied “bread and roses,” to arrive at the feminized riot. To name a rose is to really refer to one, sure—like, how nice, language works!—but in naming the bread riot, it becomes a bit clearer that referring isn’t enough. The phrase neither starts the riot nor pacifies the hungry with food. As soon as the terms are set up, such that it seems we’re encountering a peculiar kind of thesis—a left revision of modernism, flowers turned to hatchets—De'Ath abandons them both for a new turn, now more interested in following the emotional life of the sentence’s economic characters. The concept of “women” starts to move historically, bread and roses as a demand for women’s dignity beyond mere natural need.

The question of political poetry’s flowers always sends me back to George Oppen’s “The Mind’s Own Place” (a 1962 essay in Kulchur, originally written for and rejected by The Nation), where Oppen considers the role natural beauty might play in political engagement. Agreeing with Brecht’s argument that “there are times when it can be almost a crime to write of trees,” he nonetheless cautions against reading Brecht literally:

De'Ath does not speak of flowers—the book is not a force of nature, too, in its disinterest in enjambing flora and fauna—but she is not afraid of beauty. Rather than taking up this opposition between representations of nature and didacticism, De'Ath concerns herself explicitly with the production of nature, things both “Monumental & manmade / the aesthetic & the repulsive.” Language itself is a site of natural construction, after all; when she writes “Land in Saskatchewan, land in Delhi / As if the earth existed twice,” she suggests that place names make doubles of their geographic referents. Not a Force of Nature participates in what Oppen describes as the effort to “restore a meaning to the word” reality, a precondition, he argues, to having any kind of conversation about political poetry. Oppen thinks we need reality to mean “the things that exist,” that this definition gets rid of an apparent choice between two kinds of poets:

This is De'Ath’s collocative world, “muscle and nerves / touch as opposed to x-ray vision, spirit, or concept”—by rooting language in the really existing stuff of our surroundings, and words in with their common bedfellows, we’re freed from both documentary and frigid idealism, engaged, instead, in something more like dance.