City Scattered: Cabaret for Four Voices

Goblets of gin, fans of feathers, war-bombed bricks, loaves of bread, soot, smoke, and paper money-such are the tangible things that touched the lives of women who worked as wage laborers during an era of Europe of cabaret and hyperinflation. The crises of modernity and capital, as well as the human experiences of women and who loved, lost, and fought against the structures of privilege that all the while aided them during a fraught stretch of time between wars, come alive in City Scattered, a chapbook of poems that invite us to experience and examine the conditions of labor that echo those of our current day.'City Scattered invokes the bleak not-so-cabaret-life of an imagined Berlin in four voices. Along with a German woman, there's an ethnographer who plays a Victrola and takes notes ("but you can already/ find all that in novels," answers an informant), an interlocutor critiquing, and a chorus (counted as one voice). The Berlin woman "being self-serving, promiscuous, and unmotherly, was nevertheless the darling of a new consumer culture" negotiates the realm. "The real power of light is presence" writes author Tyler Mills, but the light shed in the series "I / Self / Woman in Berlin" is a power itself "with coal staining the sheets/like ink." Congratulations!'Terese Svoboda'In City Scattered, through gorgeous strands of speech, Tyler Mills perceptively reintegrates our sacred, forgotten past into a portrait of a woman whose self-possession and complexity are palpably rendered. Only a poet with such sensitivities of language can so clearly hear and interpret the immortal silence of history; only a poet attuned to her own incandescent spirit can test the oneiric nature of poetry with such vigor of mind.'Major Jackson'Tyler Mills' The City Scattered is a rich document of the "inner architecture" and social displacements that occur under the "skies / of capital." Its choral structure deftly links the late days of the Weimar Republic to labor in the age of Amazon. Through swift images and attention to the complexity of pleasure, Mills' poems show the independence and alienation of workers, particularly women, for whom the "purse thickens" while unemployment rises and money is "losing value." Her crisp, suggestive case study illuminates the confluence of precarity and prosperity at the heart of our era. "Do not lean out," warns a sign on a window in one poem; but we're already leaning closer to read.'Zach Savich