Oil Spell by Claire Marie Stancek

TARYN HUBBARD

Oil Spell is the innovative, polyphonic second collection from Ontario-born, California-based poet, Claire Marie Stancek. The book explores drone attacks, the environment, and the moon through succinct, piercing language and the summoning of found texts—drawing on work by Anne Radcliffe and Dorothy Wordsworth, a leaked Pakistani government report on CIA drone strikes, and the IUCN Red List on Threatened Species.

Throughout the collection, Stancek mimics the vocal casting of spells with a series of concrete poems called “fang vision spells,” where text is shaped on the page in billowing, bubbling forms, as if visually erupting from a hot cauldron below the pages of the book. The language in these poems is guttural, giving the reader a mash of consonance with enticing brews like “woah what made i/you was a needle a thread a name : wolfed” and “/we shriek perch / we shriek p-deeer ohwowowo.”

Speaking of shrieking, language is noisy in this book and Stancek demonstrates great attention to how the sound of carefully chosen words have the power to build up one after another and produce their own nuanced musicality:

Petals stuck struck & splayed on murky glass: sun a dust in the lungs. Where spell shudders your fingers. Here it goes watch closely: irregular turn. Path of wood rings ring works ringing steel bells.

Additionally, with the repetition of words like “chirrup,” “roar,” “bark,” and “gabble” throughout, she cloaks the text in a vibration of unintelligible sound, giving her work a background score that buzzes and hums behind its invocation.

In the last piece, “r.i.o.t.o.f,” Stancek engages two ubiquitous phrases echoed throughout media headlines and police reports, “‘shots were fired’” and “‘officer-involved shooting,’” and repeats them to call to task their ambiguity and lack of ownership. In one instance she writes: “‘Officer-involved shooting’ means the mouth is speaking for itself clattering against wooden teeth. ‘Officer-involved shooting’ means I want to hear you say it, go ahead.’” With these phrases she points to the passive, indirect tone in reports on gun violence, where the subject is lacking in order to create distance between the action and the aftermath. As the poem moves on, Stancek points to the absurdity of these oft-quoted euphemisms, by using parts of the phrases as nouns, for example “‘Shots is speaking take ahead,’” “‘Officer-involved mouth,’” and “‘the arrives speak leaves a shooting.’”

Oil Spell is an enchanting, challenging collection—one that offers a multifaceted, multi-voiced experience with a lot for the reader to consider.