Haley Jenkins’ NATURE EXISTS LAUGHING

The understanding of ice — both the substance and applied concept, the ways in which population wouldn’t have made it this far without its steady presence — takes heavy emphasis throughout Haley Jenkins’ collection. I suggest reading NATURE EXISTS LAUGHING in cycles, while keeping in mind the miracle, and specifically, cognition of life.

Reading the collection requires a certain level of adaptability in the reader, partially because of format, which exists in the difficult medium of hybridity: visual and textual, further evincing the feeling we’re recipients of the applied pressures of the poet. Primitive only in the respect of the causal “ape” (“cyanobacteria”) reference, the sum of Jenkins’ writing’s intelligence shirks a totalized sum in favor of something better. Its eyes-to-the-stars fortissimo accelerates the collection into a rarity I’d have to clumsily name claim to: lyricized scientific inquiry, and becomes — by its middle — something I’d pin as quietly revolutionizing.

Reading this genre of poetry always feels like sorting through a palimpsest to me. The creative avenues for self-expression flower when verse is paired with white space. The geometry of word placement and the excruciating detail to formatting lends itself elegantly to Jenkins’ work. 

While reading, you can’t quite shake the thought, “my god, how long did this take them,” and that’s a good thing, acts as a further undercurrent of genuine appreciation for 1. what Jenkins is doing (approaching science with the Aquarian perspective of Mama Earth and Artist), and 2. schooling us on the badassery of fractal poetry, and, in its wake, trumping the paragraph completely in favor of value and space and itemized verbal dispatch.

In the opening poem “void”, Jenkins approaches the broad subject of Nature equally—and, to this reader’s mind— properly broadly: sun, sky, heaven, planetoids, death, stars, cells, magma, cosmos. All veritable key words Jenkins has acutely placed like pressure points throughout the text.

(It reads like the Big Bang would if the event had been recorded and copied onto somewhat smoldery parchment lying about newly as-of-a-few-seconds-ago-formed Creation.)

I wonder who the transcriptionist was — and that’s the thing about this collection — it, kind of similar to a child cracking open textbook for the first time to chapters on evolution — makes you wonder. An all-over-again kind of feeling, something that resets and rewires, drags you back to childhood in the space of meters, measuring out a tempo that at its core lays foundations for ingenuity and true, dear surprise. In this case of transcriptionist, it’s Jenkins.

We mount this belief in place, and trusting, continue forward. There’s assistance of DNA in our wake.

In “evolution” Jenkins plays with science. It’s as productive as it is fun to read: a dusted scattering of letters on the right-hand side of the page cleverly redirects us to the title’s subject, while also calling to mind letters involved in a DNA sequence. It ends with one of my favorite lines in the collection:

“grunting under young stars”

a further suggestion of one of nature’s most favored activities (and impetus for evolution) — not stars, not God, just — sex. “primordial depression” directly addresses one of primate’s most enduring problems: mental health, in lines like,

“you told me I smell of / a condition in far below”.

In “comfrey” Jenkins titles their poem after the Symphytum plant, which in Latin translates roughly to “heal”, suggesting a genetic togetherness, and middles the poem with one of the best singular lines I’ve read in months:

“your kisses thrive in damp habitats,”

further edging around the topic of disease, and death (“ashes”). By the end of this brief, bitingly brilliant collection, we’re placed resolutely in the future and asked by the poet on a date to the museum. “nuclear exhibit” betrays its longing for both looking ahead with the diabolical gaze and sobriety of minor prophet, and plugs pressing discussions around the very likely potential for apocalypse. In itemized paragraphs, we’re pressed glimpses of curated assortments of future-shock photographs depicting facets of life that crescendos.

This reader imagines Jenkins flipping carefully through the unknown like an archaeologist would hieroglyphics to a full symposium —

celebration; aftermath; the feminine form (read: radioactive women doused in refurbished mythology and reference); monstrosities (babies, rubber wings); the cryptic nature of disease, disease-defiant dogs; other minatory artifacts

— leaving us wondering what’s next and whether Jenkins’ elegant, psychic clutch on poetry will prove an accurate forecast.