Eight Positive Trees
Karen Weiser
Pressed Wafer
Boston, MA
(c)2002
Even with a digital trail sometimes it's best to imagine where the shadow of a poet lingers now. After books published by the likes of Ugly Duckling Presse, a poet like this one can claim a space on the Academy of American Poets website and then not provide any info whatsoever. If you will, a white ghost instead of the traditional black.
What I do know is that this chapbook by the now deceased and discontinued Pressed Wafer is on a table in front of me: half smiling. The booklet is divided into two sections, actually. "Out of the Body there are Planned Things" for Fanny Howe is first, a crash course for those (like me) unfamiliar with Ms. Weiser's work and then the somewhat misleading titled section "8 Positive Trees" taking it's name from a sculpture by Menashe Kadishman. (there are only 7 poems)
I love the brevity of her work here. It's refreshingly deep and subtly so. The words don't have to scream their message, the flow is more of a trickling creek - not the Mississippi River emptying into the Gulf of Mexico.
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