Ish Klein’s Consolation and Mirth

A Review of Ish Klein’s Consolation and Mirth

Poetry is a form of code. Deciphering this code can result in a surprising array of emotions: it can reveal information of vital importance; it can relay ideas in an undetectable fashion. It can also go straight to the heart of discomfort. I have been thinking about poetry as code a lot these days. I am thinking about my own relationship with discomfort as well. Ish Klein’s latest collection from Canarium, Consolation and Mirth, fits quite well with these ideas now. It shows us both how to decode a certain language and how to allow for not-knowing; it brings us face-to-face with what it feels like when we can’t decode anything. In Consolation and Mirth, Klein presents us with a world of dis-riddles, puzzles in various forms of decay, distorting the familiar language of instruction manuals and quizzers into the unsolvable; forcing readers into a place of discordant unease where the question is not what are the answers, but why do we so desperately need them. There are the entanglements of poetic language, explicitly, but so many of these poems seem to be actual cryptographs, full of semaphore and signal. Take for instance “Tactile Alphabet,” where phrases explain both physical instructions, empathetic interjections, and mandative subjunctive, but to an unknown end:

(Y) Add over this “Y” to face the earth, the one “Y” to face the sky.

(Z)

Then 90 degrees clockwise “z” atop the 180 degrees “z”.

Do the instructions make sense? That is hardly the point. Our minds respond to the commands despite the oddity of it all; we humans are problem-solvers and Klein knows this. Yet, deliberately, nothing comes from the steps—this is not an IKEA manual; you will not produce a white particleboard desk at the end. Still, Consolation and Mirth kept me looking for that proverbial desk—i spent much of my time glancing to the back of the book for an answer key, as I have been trained to do since childhood. There is no key. The feeling inside me, discovering this lack over and over, was strangely