Though it’s not my nature to respond to a review of one of my books, this particular micro-review is so confusing and contradictory that I feel I must. I’m sympathetic to the limitations of the restricted editorial space that Ms. Newlove Schroeder was given, but with respect, she seems either to have not given the book much attention or to have read another book entirely. fall is not about the fall of man but about the word “fall” explored through its 72 definitions, from a language created and developed after a real or imagined expulsion from the garden, and weighted with loss, homesickness, and flaw.

Adam and Eve do dominate the first section, where I establish a pre-language existence in a presumed Eden. However, Ms. Newlove Schroeder’s having found herself in a “somewhat predictabl[e]” moment “when the first man names the animals” means she must be driving herself to a poem she’s writing in her head. For where Ms. Newlove Schroeder sees “the first man names the animals,” I must correct her: although Adam attempts to put elements into linguistic terms, he’s unable to because “there was no word for it.” Released from the mouth, “language,” for Adam, “simplifies in air” which is why he can only imagine. This is one of several clear examples in the book. Directly after the transgression and expulsion, Eve finally, and first, attempts utterance in the new world: “her/ isolate hunger returns, /with vowels, with panting syllables, with utterance inexhaustible.” The end of the first section addresses, lists and explores the development of language, dictionaries, wordbooks, as a consequence of the fall:

So they saved their letters, words, pretty as a box
in a series of books: Abecedarium. Aevary.
Catholican. Dictionary. Manipulus.

But the homesickness remains. When the planet looks away
across the fields, the dark lining of the day in repose.
I wish I could tell you. Like the dictionaries,

the earth is veil of the primary world.
There was the lush place, immaculate as lust.
Its disappearance burned into language.

The conceit of my project is that words come into being as a created tool after transgression. The book stresses the inability of this post-lapsarian tool of language, weighted as it is with a homesickness, to adequately address being in this world, a subject of poetry. This is why I begin one poem with the sentence “In a series of poems I’m unable to write,” and why I say elsewhere in the book (more than once, as you see above) “I wish I could tell you.” The subject is neither hidden by diversion nor difficult to discern; several reviewers have recognized that the book takes language as its subject.

Ms. Newlove Schroeder writes that I “brave[] cliché and tedium with this collection,” but it was neither clichéd nor tedious for me to write. I think she means the reader has to endure cliché and tedium, yet she offers no examples except that in her imagination I wrote a book about the story of the fall of man, which she thinks is cliché. (And in defense of the many writers who address aspects of that compelling topic, I’d ask her to keep in mind that all subjects have been done: Man Good, Nature Bad, or Man Bad, Nature Good, but the treatment is always what makes the work new. As Charles Wright says, “what you have to say — though ultimately all-important — in most cases will not be news. How you say it just might be.”) In either case, Ms. Newlove Schroeder’s diction is off.

I’m confused by the contradictions. While I appreciate “technical mastery,” that would seem to fly in the face of tedium and cliché (as well as Ms. Newlove Schroeder’s criticism of the “programmatic use of such a closely controlled organizing principle”). The phrase suggests a mastery of technique such as in traditional, formal work, which appears nowhere in this particular book, and is misused or misapplied and unexplained and, coming as it does after her statement that this is a book about the fall of man, makes me now sound like Milton. She might have meant innovative use of formal elements, in which case, thank you. Finally, “tropically inclined”? “humid”? Where? Apples? Really. To quote Reginald Shepherd, who would have encouraged me to respond to this review because my book, and every book, deserves better: “as we used to say in my old neighborhood, you must be tripping.”