{"id":637,"date":"2016-12-25T04:17:08","date_gmt":"2016-12-25T10:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/?p=637"},"modified":"2017-12-28T22:21:00","modified_gmt":"2017-12-29T04:21:00","slug":"on-jesse-nissims-where-they-would-never-be-invited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/on-jesse-nissims-where-they-would-never-be-invited\/","title":{"rendered":"On Jesse Nissim\u2019s Where They Would Never Be Invited<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jessica Cuello, Guest Contributor<\/h2>\n

Book Review: Where They Would Never Be Invited<\/em> by Jesse Nissim
\nSan Francisco, CA: Black Radish Books, 2016. 56 pages. $17.00.<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was a little girl\u2014and even now\u2014I stared into the windows of houses. Inside other houses was ideal love and emotional fulfillment. Even my dreams were filled with houses where I wandered, searching for my own psyche. Jesse Nissim\u2019s Where They Would Never Be Invited<\/em> literally peers into one of our most primal needs: the desire for home.<\/p>\n

The book is divided into three long poems: All Entrances, Open House, and Nesting Instinct, and in them, Nissim evokes an old idea\u2014that the reason we linger over architecture and objects in the first place is because we project ourselves onto them. The poems exude loneliness, and often a heart-wrenching emptiness, while depicting the most vulnerable parts of people without the presence of people.<\/p>\n

In a strange and luminous way, the physical elements of the house overpower the human. The humans remain at a distance, seeking intimacy and safety via a home\u2019s interior: \u201cLate at night I covet the warmest \/ feeling the tile anticipates. \/ I want an easy refuge I can touch \/ I seek freezers fully stocked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet Nissim reminds the reader that houses fail to protect. The material world is just as ephemeral and even more fragile than our intangible longings. It too can be sold to us and taken from us. It too can offer to fulfill our desires and leave us empty. So too can it fail to protect us from the elements:<\/p>\n

A tornado opened a surprise
\nin the vicinity of nestled children.
\nNo coastline grumbled a response.
\nA schoolhouse whose nameplates
\ndisappeared when all the windows
\nlifted up. Signs and critics and
\nreplicas rushed in like water views
\nskewered on unsuspecting buildings.
\nYes, I have heard of the sea. Have you
\nheard it filling with debris?<\/p>\n

Nissim dismantles the brick and mortar of homes and reveals them to be thinly disguised dreams. Whatever we hope to control by living within a home, whatever we hope to preserve, is no safer than anything else. In poem one, \u201cAll Entrances,\u201d she writes:<\/p>\n

I build the house eternally \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0a mechanical enclosure
\nwith sharply bolted doors. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Translucent delusions<\/p>\n

Not only does Nissim tear apart the market lie and the promises of advertisers, she reveals that home ownership is part of a larger American mythology. Nissim writes, \u201cI want to suggest a bigger more opulent guilt \/ about the subject. The dream\u2014no longer \/ a new-placed \u201cstable\u201d star\u2014now has \/ beautiful cost-lines and cranky stains.\u201d In emotionally charged images, Nissim shows how \u201cWe participate in the human nourishment\u201d and have ingested the images of domesticity and intimacy from the housing market. She writes:<\/p>\n

Years boxed for reassembly
\nto know covetous lineage
\nbrick by brick and the gilded
\nfurniture. Vast near the coast
\nof cavernous spaces, sometimes
\nthere is a tapestried doorway
\ncovering God\u2019s money.<\/p>\n

The poems draw not only on our desires\u2014what we wish houses would do for us\u2014but on the economic realities of the 2008 housing market crash. Nissim states in her acknowledgements that she \u201cstarted this book amidst the economic recession and the resulting housing crisis of 2008.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lines like \u201cThe narcissistic wound \/ humiliated our walls. \/ We were a bad reputation,\u201d encapsulate how houses conflate our emotional desires with materialism.<\/p>\n

Home becomes a physical reminder of human failure: \u201cThroughout my displacement my dreams \/ have become ordinary. The wish language \/ of desire is unmet\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The language underscores the resulting demoralization and fear connected to losing one\u2019s home. If we are homeless are we also nameless? Are we without family? Are we a loser as a father? As a mother? Homes are falsely tied to our identity and value:<\/p>\n

Despite wide lawns a house is symptomatically
\nnameless. Part deserted or debased, a few paces
\nahead a glorified symmetry. A father.
\nHis enchantment. His blank step before him.<\/p>\n

Part of the beauty in this book is in the depiction of the objects themselves; Nissim captures the spookiness of an object without an owner, and the poems themselves are endowed with the kind of charge that objects deeply associated with humans exude. The poems are both tender and electric. Houses represent an essential desire for safety\u2014for arrival at a place free from fear\u2014and Nissim demonstrates that it is not possible, that this hope has been made impossible. It is a lie that wounds those who believe in it. Nissim looks sympathetically at the human cost of that lie and, in fact, lays a partial groundwork for our current historical moment post-election.<\/p>\n

\u2245<\/p>\n

\"Jessica<\/a>
\nJessica Cuello is the author of Pricking<\/em> (Tiger Bark Press, 2016) and Hunt<\/em>, which was selected as the winner of The 2016 Washington Prize from The Word Works. She is also the author of three chapbooks and a recipient of The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and The Decker Award for outstanding teaching.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jessica Cuello, Guest Contributor Book Review: Where They Would Never Be Invited by Jesse Nissim San Francisco, CA: Black Radish Books, 2016. 56 pages. $17.00. When I was a little girl\u2014and even now\u2014I stared into the windows of houses. Inside … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[242],"tags":[244,245,243],"class_list":["post-637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-home-ownership","tag-housing-market-crash","tag-jesse-nissim"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":769,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions\/769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}