Ander Monson - Reviews

Reviews

Interspersed throughout Other Electricities are a series of radio schematics, black and white diagrams of nodes and connections. Next to them, Ander Monson has written what at first appear to be impenetrable captions: “Dear, some distances are accidental”; “Dear, distance is a constellation, dead light from distant stars"; “Dear, this distance is now all I have, a wine-dark sea, a solo moan, a haunting." There’s no terminal punctuation; the sentences just hang there in midair, a lot like a radio transmission that suddenly goes dead. There’s a growing sense of desperation in the messages as the book progresses, and it ends with a final one-line transmission that somehow both ties everything together and busts it apart. If that sounds vague, it’s because Other Electricities affects you on an ethereal level -- it’s angelic and musical, and more than anything I’ve read recently, it begs to be experienced and not just read.

Ander Monson grew up in remote, grim northern Michigan and (if we trust the poems) lost at least two of his closest friends before they had finished high school. Or, if you prefer: Ander Monson has breathed life into a fictive northern Michigan townscape where two teenagers have died in an auto accident before finishing high school, and a third narrates poems about them.