by Brandon Rushton | Contributing Writer

Our Earliest Tattoos
Peter Twal
University of Arkansas Press, 2018
On November 26, 2018, as NASAâs mission control slapped hands in celebration of InSightâs successful landing, its predecessor, Curiosity, was playing a roll as the centerpiece in Peter Twalâs debut poetry collection, Our Earliest Tattoos. The book is a multifaceted experiment that interrogates the poemâs modern and historical role as dispatch and transmission. With a cyborgian intellect, Twalâs speaker constructs a science-scape, a mechanical universe composed of earthly and otherworldly elements. While Curiosity roams the surface of Mars, Twalâs speaker is busy back on earth assembling and disassembling his friends, those patchwork people composed from parts and memories. Through the metaphor of the Mars rover, readers quickly link its prodding of the planet with Twalâs probing of the past. Theyâre both sifting through the dust and remnants of another time, another world, another planet. Theyâre looking for signs of life in hopes to prove thatâat one timeâthey were there.
Twalâs speaker insinuates that what appears arid never is. As he interrogates the past, readers come to realize the re-livable aspects of places, people, and time. The past is alive in Our Earliest Tattoos; itâs a reservoir for recollection, a source from which to pull in order to compose a future. The present age, one similar to ours, is a dangerous world of proliferation, a digital maelstrom where dispatches are obfuscated by distraction. The best minds of Twalâs generation are endangered by technology, its proclivity for numbness and lack of action. As initiative is neutralized by its encroachment, the could- be-prophets around him sit plucking the petals from the flowers of instant fame:
. . . My whole generation combing
A hand through its hair Notice me Notice me
not
In the echo chamber of our narcissistic era, clarity is a limited resource, a product of bygone days; days where true language was not drowned out by the static of the self-concerned. When the speaker turns to rely on language, he finds his own words deflected back at him, as he does in the poem âIf Youâre Worried About the Weather,â where he âcant hear anything / outside of [his] own voice [his] own voiceless.â Twal reclaims new media from mindlessness and resituates tweets, status updates, emails, and text messages as the new artifacts of historical and cultural memory. Twalâs debut is part poetry, part digital anthropology; readers often find his speaker scrutinizing fragments of sentences, bodies, and demolished landscapes. The brilliance of this debut rests in the assemblage of those parts. While disorder is the mainstay medium, there is, paradoxically, something secure and comforting in the vortex: The laws he creates in his poems govern the chaos. For all of the explosive language and content they contain, the poems act primarily as binding agents, giving form to all the attention-deficient flotsam spiraling around us. As the curious periscope of this book swivels to confront the possibilities of past and future, the poems dispatch through time, both ways.
Twal explores that idea of chaotic order all around us. By explosively deconstructing and reinventing the sonnet, he has chosen the form through which he will examine fragments of modern life. Each title has, in some way, been taken from lyrics of LCD Soundsystemâs song, âAll My Friends.â Through the electronic fuzz of T.V. static, PA feedback, phonograph scratches, and radio dials, Twal twists together an intimate portrait of family, culture, memory, and loss. Like any good scientist, Twal understands successful experiments are also exercises in constraint (âEven the dumbest explosion / possesses the smarts to say I will only blow up this farâ). This scientific awareness and careful approach to experimentation draws Hayan Charara and Fady Joudah to the claim in the book’s introduction that Twal has âsucceeded in reinvigorating the form, but also in adding his voiceâ and that he is a poet âto whose sonnet-conversation we should care to listen.â
In addition to reclaiming the sonnet form from the past, Twal draws inspiration from the mother of experimentation herself. Taking a page from Mary Shelley (âthat I could resurrect anythingâ), Twalâs speaker Frankensteins his friends together through the remnants of an industrial era: âcellophane skin,â âaluminum neck,â and ârusty veins.â His industrial-human-hybrids bring us closer to an old understanding about memory and language: They work together simultaneously to reanimate.
The haunting aspects of absence are felt everywhere in the book. Whether itâs presented through the formal gaps in the reinvigorated sonnet form or, through the frustration of trying to assemble a friend from memory, the apertures left by loss are ever-present. Though we see a speaker wrestling with the pain of reanimating those he loves we come to understand that all efforts are better than the opposite: the apathy of âthe piecewise way we forget / people cutting them up, hiding the memories in our freezers.â For Twal, memory is a unit of measurement, a way to keep the scientific mind on its toes, ensuring that it remains inquisitive, calling for new ways to see. He makes that sentiment clear in his poem, âSewn into Submissionâ:
. . . Growth would be me
Not expecting you to show up with your shadow unbuttoned
& I stare & those nightmares slowly running progress
are misery, are memory sewing my eyes open
Twalâs book charts a spectrum of absence for its readers, zeroing in on the psychological impacts of sudden loss. Considering the ubiquitous reference to explosives and explosions (IEDs, landmines, etc.) readers get a sense of how complicated it is to cope and mourn the unanticipated. After such an explosion forms an aperture, Twal asserts that what is leftâwhen there is nothing leftâis memory. More than that, he pairs his ubiquity of explosives to the torturous practice of waterboarding. This allows readers to understand the larger commentary he has intertwined about diaspora, familial responsibility, cultural lineage, and oneâs heritage to a homeland in a region destabilized by the Westâs imperialist politics and love of war .
The speaker in this book is accounting for both personal loss and cultural endangerment. No where is this more apparent than in âWe Set Controls for the Heart,â where he becomes âthis / body of refugees between whose cushions / will you one day find my body.â Twal wrestles with the guilt for not living the same experience of his betters, his ancestors; guilt for the absence of friends, family, and his distance from a history, culture, country, and life; and lastly, guilt for his presence in the face of all that absence. In turn, readers develop guilt for participating in and perpetuating a system responsible for creating the absences the speaker traces and outlines. One of the most moving moments of the collection is when the speaker forges a covenant with his predecessors in the poem âOh, This Could be the Last Time so Here.â By using toy soldiers as metaphor and medium, the speaker promises to keep the memory of his betters alive, to keep looking for the fragments of their stories everywhere and in everything he does:
. . . Elsewhere, a child loses a few toy
soldiers in a red field: One, prone, wielding a bayonet, while another will never stop
sweeping its metal detector over the dirt
While Twalâs speaker sweeps over the landscape of his past, readers are reminded that memory has reverberationsâqualities that sometimes manifest themselves as blowback. Scouring the past can become a form of self-sabotage, a risk Twalâs speaker is always willing to take. The potential reward of successful reanimation is too high: His loved ones might live again. Thatâs why the speaker doesnât flinch while addressing those loved ones in the poem âWhere Are Your Friends Tonight,â telling them directly that âthe doctor / removes shards of you from my skin like splinters.â
While it wrestles with the heaviness of history, Twalâs book is also a statement about being young in the present. The experimentation, energy, and momentum generated in the book could have only been done so by a poet at their beginning. This is a book written in love by a poet ready to prank and play with language, whose irreverent enjambments (âIs the toilet overflowing / Is someone beating off / the hinges of this stallâ) convince readers the speaker has bought into the sentiment of LCD Soundsystemâs youthful thesis when they sing âI wouldnât trade one stupid decision for another five years of life.â
It is the hope and longing of youth that presents Our Earliest Tattoos as a quest for intimacy, whose want for togetherness is a wish that might solder together past, present, and future. The bookâs main question is asked in âThe Moral Kicks In:â âWere we ever anything / more than echolocationâ? How else do we, the young of the 21st century, form a sense of self beyond taking note of the absences around us?
After rendering a poetic sonar system of his own, it feels appropriate that Twalâs speaker gravitates toward the self-destructive after having engaged in such an extensive charting of absence. In the poem âPeople Who are Trying to be Politeâ readers are left with the image of the speaker offering to share a cigarette with the world. So addicted to such a small show of camaraderie, fellowship, and communion, the speaker is willing âeven [to] take the end on fire.â
As the intimate actions in Our Earliest Tattoos blend together risk and excitement, readers come to understand that the potentially self-destructive can provide a path toward progress. For example, considering this scene in âWeather, Then You Picked the Wrong Place to Stayâ readers are reminded of the destructive ways in which they too forged their path:
. . . Here we are,
you wrapping a plastic bag around my head my tongue trying
to poke a hole through the past
After having been ushered through what proves to be an emotional ringer, readers find themselves frantically longing for the coping mechanisms of their own youthâmaybe a long ride to nowhere with some good friends, the windows down and the radio on. Reader, if you find yourself on the road with an absence of air in your chest and canât breathe, relax: Youâre just one of Twalâs blue jays now âback on the moon, eventually bluer than it was born to be.â
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Brandon Rushtonâs recent poems appear in Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, Bennington Review, Forklift, Ohio, and Passages North. In 2016, he was the winner of the Gulf Coast Prize and the Ninth Letter Award for Poetry. His critical essays and reviews appear in Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Born and raised in Michigan, he now lives and writes in Charleston, South Carolina and teaches writing at the College of Charleston.