In Glint (Harbor Editions, 2021), Carole Symer strikes a tone that brims with human warmth, humor and affection. How such a voice could be made possible in a series of experimental, minimalist lyrics that borrow their fragmentary edges from none other than Sappho is the great accomplishment of Glint. Here is I, of the 25 Roman-numeraled sections that comprise the chapbook: 

wouldn’t it be just like our baby 

to come on a Sunday in August traffic 

you mimicking Nurse Ratched 

and me relieved it wasn’t my sister’s cooking 

that poisoned the evening 

swooning under yellow hospital light 

for one more lick of ice 

and you Tesoro 

oddly content with cold hospital ziti

Accented by the experimental form, this tongue-in-cheek personal account is rife with sarcasm and pop culture references that counterbalance the life-and-death stakes of childbirth. There is humor under duress, inside jokes and real relationship dynamics. Real—it’s all so intensely real. But Symer doesn’t stop there. She doesn’t settle for idiosyncrasy. Glint never collapses into an exercise in neo-confessional navel-gazing. From the get-go, these compelling splashes of life are offset by the large, scientific questions of the 21st century. An address to the infant in the very next poem casts “a mother’s antibodies” as “the language of water,” suggesting that Symer, a practicing psychologist in Ann Arbor, keeps one foot planted in the sciences, the other in the humanities. This is a stance that humanizes science and sciences humanness. 

Here, in an especially hairlike, haiku-sized fragment, Symer explodes even that dichotomy:

these our bodies

like primordial jellyfish 

dreaming with volume up

If poetry’s job is to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange, then I would like to dream myself into a volume like this, a primordial jellyfish. It is this infatuation with the origins of things that makes Sappho such an ideal companion. She haunts these pages: “did you smell like Earl Grey and honey,” the speaker asks, “when you were our girl’s sweet age of five or whiffs of fresh cut grass and olive oil?” Ancienter still than this spirit guide is, of course, the question of how things smell. Our sense of smell has its center deep in the brain. Deeper than sight, and yet most of our poems are populated by imagery in the narrow sense of an image: “petals on a wet, black bough.” Glint is all about the smell, “how after rain smells—when flesh feels most savage …”

July, 2021