Coach House Books, 2007
Read by Aaron Giovannone
Sarah Lang’s first book The Work of Days captures the intimacy and alienation of domestic existence in supple and surprising language.
Lang’s writing bristles with quiet energy even as it reproduces the monotony of domestic routine. Subtle rhythms surface in unadorned diction, as in the following short poem:
The fruit, flower of
The shape
The use of (15)
By carefully pruning and peeling her language, Lang reveals the music in articles and prepositions: those mundane words that usually perform the unglamorous chores in our sentences.
The subtly of this language is thrown into relief, however, when it is injected with a specialist’s discourse:
Folding blueberries into batter; the dog’s nose
is up my skirt. The taste of benzodiazepine and/or paroxetine (12)
Like the dog’s nose, the techno-latinate vocabulary surprises. In this context, we also find the names of drugs inducing the condition they treat and performing the cure: while initially worried by these difficult words, the reader slows to pronounce each syllable and is finally tranquillized.
In its finale, The Work of Days shifts to an outdoor environment. The metaphorical language in this section is, however, still consistent with the domestic ambiance of the rest of the book. Here the body is projected outwardly, but nevertheless a domestic interior impinges on the scene:
The city has drawn a blank. How big
You are; a tarmac in the cool summer…
I never claimed
Gravity, strength. From the left, a cot
Has great significance. Like the city
We squeeze in tight for a photograph (75).
The frame of the photograph finally constrains us to intimacy inside of it. It’s not that the Romantic project, which domesticates the outside world, fails or is ignored here. Rather, this project is so thoroughly complete that an outside no longer exists: “we” figuratively become the city, the very space we inhabit.
