Reviews

A Thousand Profane Pieces
- review by Jim Johnstone

A Thousand Profane Pieces opens with the striking "Trophy Poets," an interesting role reversal where women are objectified based on their intellect as opposed to their beauty. The poem makes note of intellect as a desired quality, one that wealthy men make clumsy attempts to share: "Some of these bankers have poetic aspirations: when they bring / a sonnet or haiku to the table the romance is dead." For Wallin, stereotypes are constructed to be broken, inverted, or have new life breathed into them.

Throughout the poems in this debut collection, Myna Wallin struggles with superficial notions of youth and beauty. These notions contrast with the empowerment Wallin has gained through her own self-exploration, coaxing the reader into the heart of her struggle. In "The Self-Improvement Revolution" she strikes a balance between the two when she writes "I'm learning to lucid dream, / be powerful in and out of my conscious awareness, / in and out of my boa-feathered baby dolls." Wallin becomes a chameleon; the enlightened woman who understands that self-improvement as dictated by consumer culture is a myth, yet she sometimes indulges in it herself.

Elsewhere, in the cynical, yet important poem "An Object Lesson", Wallin delves into the theme of exploitation:

Power-dressing at 23: fishnets, garter-belts,
fuck-me pumps, the makeup of evangelists.
A cab driver ogles, You should be Miss America,
and the horror flick director: lose the shirt.
Before she knows it makes her flush,
she's undoing buttons, unhooking her bra.
The director again, Polaroid her, caffeinated,
to the kid who's died and gone to PA heaven
where pretty women remove their shirts on command,
to start in some low-budget piece-of-shit
financed by periodontists looking for tax shelters.
Everybody's happy except the boyfriend,
You call that acting? And her, crying
even though her agent said it would lead
to bigger things. She gives it up to enroll
in school - her professor of Moral Philosophy
propositions her and she's back to the mirror
to guess what she's worth, counting
pores, assessing change. And later,
Men will treat her with respect, not lust,
And she'll wonder which was worse?

The book includes two meditations written about vacationing in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. In these poems Wallin explores popular culture from the beach, and is able to contrast her own experiences as a mature woman with the youth on spring break. Here, Wallin is the voyeur "trying to conjure youth with / as much success as Houdini had / in contacting his mother." Ultimately, she is too wise to trade the power she has gained with maturity for the naivety of youth.

When A Thousand Profane Pieces moves away from the beach, Wallin is fond of constructing metaphors around animals. The third section of the book "Off-Limits," is littered with cats, weasels, cougars, and raccoons. In "Wildlife" she writes:

It cost 10 US dollars to pet the cougar
and receive this digital memento.
My boyfriend declined to touch the feline,
saying I was enough for him,
with my upturned eyes and overdeveloped incisors.

Wallin is able to use the familiar to her advantage, disarming the reader with a familiar scenario and playful language before a sudden, radical alteration to the scene. Despite the fact that the book details her search for identity, it is written with certainty and clarity. She's technically proficient, as comfortable writing "Sonnet for John," as she is the prose poem "Meditation on a Photograph," explaining "There's a formal family photo on the wall above my desk. I'm about a year old, sitting on my mother's lap like a ventriloquist's dummy, or a big toy doll where you pull the string and her pudgy arms wave..."

Myna Wallin has gained an impressive following in the literary community as a successful book publisher, radio host and poet. This highly anticipated first full-length collection of poems fulfils the promise of her earlier chapbooks, creating a cohesive body of both new and old work. It's a carefully written, enticing and subtle set of explorations. The reader is left with the impression that Wallin found what she was looking for in the revelations and sharp observations that hold the words in this collection together.

Jim F. Johnstone is the recipient of the 2005-2006 E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry. His chapbook, siamese poems, is available from Surly Editions.