Arielle Greenberg’s collection, Given, calls Mary Jo Bang and other playful poets to mind. Where Bang champions the pure aesthetic experience, flaunting wordplay and teasing linear thought out of linguistic bliss only to fracture it again, Greenberg strives for poignance and clarity. If her ultimate goal is still the perfect set of sounds, she risks a great deal in the process. Where the risk is taken, of confessionalism that evokes the best and worst of love poems, her gifts for fragmentation and surrealism work their magic. The book represents a dance toward, and away from, pivotal experiences of loss and grim triumph, in the course of which a host of symbols, conventions and themes are invoked, playfully subverted, and resurrected in a form more personal to the author. Dolls accompany murderers on their missions. A tornado demolishes a Dairy Queen and picks up sweetness. Shifting names, shapes–"I am this burning building with five creases"–and emotional registers, Greenberg’s narrator strives for a universal identification with the poetic tradition, symbols of childhood fractured in the flux of sexual awakening, and, ultimately, her own experiences.
   One of the most deliberately tricky poems in the collection is "Metric: The Pleasures of (the keyhole)," which foregrounds structure and device with the goal of redefining them. Along with this poetic challenge comes the more personal goal of fixing sex, romance, and the gender gap in a context suited to their natures. The first stanza, "They (female/male)," blends references to nature, family, and the pocket where the omnipotent key is held. The clearest observation, "males do recognize not bliss nor afternoons," disappears under a small torrent of language:

moon is the grandfather of thefamily
a b o v e r e t u r n , h e i s g r e e n , h e i s
taking the underground to the plaza (a meter)(a match)

      The narrator’s split, between her inner world and her objective body, is boldly addressed in stanza 2, "Us (inside)/two sisters". From the blunt first line, "ten bucks inside a woman, a keyhole," it disintegrates into ornate imagery, porcelain and embroidery, out of which the heart emerges in a defiant finish, "the eyes are severed and the heart enters you." By blending traditional symbols in a startling new way, Greenberg revamps the oldest romantic symbol. The narrator’s quest for identity takes her from the male gaze to the timeless female unity suggested in the second stanza, and, finally, to "Mine all mine," stanza 3, where the subject is a third person "she," whose body becomes a house, hardened by necessity into an amalgam of personal reality and the world’s expectation, where love avoids the soul, and romantic traditions, while inescapable, serve chaotic ends:

it is inside of technique, blown glass, of wrestle
girlishness and a good lay (waylaid)
to the (limestone) graves of my last.

"The Judge’s Wife," one of the darkest, most poignant poems, presents an archetype that the narrator inhabits and then rejects. In eleven short sections, Greenberg weaves together three narrative lines. The first presents sexual symbols, the tower and the lake, in an immutable tableau, suggesting a relationship so settled that the two partners can’t move. The most intense state that the narrator can aspire to is a childlike helplessness:

There’s a tower the lake calls Brother.
She whispers, someone has lost a white dress
in my eye that swims like nightfish.
Her brother answers, stupid girl. That’s the moon.
The lake sleeps without pillows, on the wrong side,
the heart side.
She sings the song to herself:
Stupid moon. That’s the girl.

From this surreal blend of nature and domesticity, Greenberg conjures a dazzling array of images, juxtaposing city, nature, and self, producing "shark theaters, starfish theaters, theaters with the tops off." Her fragmented sense is grounded in themes of love and loss, so that the reader feels her mental abandon, and accepts whatever she has to offer, prepared for the devastating resolution:

I look back but don’t see myself
in the lake. Don’t see
the dress I lost. Don’t see either brutal-
izing lover. Don’t feel the sugar.

I notice I am emptier with you.

The judge’s wife springs from this sense of hopelessness, a suicidal figure meant to legitimize a dead love. In a desperate search for something to shore up her emptiness, the narrator has birthed an archetype whose very nature is futility. Clearly, the judge’s wife is no role model, but offers a lethal comfort. Her suicidal nature is summed up with, "At what hour did the judge’s wife dissolve into my very own cave?/Sword. Bullet. Rope. Gas." Playfully, Greenberg undercuts this sentiment in the next section, which consists of one sentence: "More violence and more nudity." The darkness of her poems ultimately surrenders to a sense of mastery, over difficult situations as well as poetic tradition. The rest of the poem juxtaposes more surreal passages with piercing confessions, in the course of which the judge’s wife is revealed as a social construction, which renders women helpless:

They have taken our keys to the end of the night.
We cannot drive, drunk as we are
on the judge’s wife.

The narrator finds neither resignation nor rebellion, but a deeper level of self-knowledge bartered for autonomy. The whole is revealed to be a dream in the last line, "{she wakes}{still}{wet}." Even here, realities overlap, and conclusions are as messy as identities.
      "The Lady from Shanghai," one of several prose poems, presents another archetype, one which provides a vengeful catharsis. Instead of dwelling in the campy glitz of the OrsonWelles film, Greenberg goes for a hard, unsentimental beginning: "Being the second film in as many days wherein someone is walked off their overdose of sleeping pills." The narrator whose indecision defined "The Judge’s Wife" enters this poem, violently and finally putting sentiment to rest for the sake of her identity. She repels all illusions, digging into unsettling truths. From discussing the romance in blunt terms, as "the big fuck you," she recalls the nostalgic time as a scene from a movie, walking "under docks, under a fog of that, the charcoal, and the untrust, spinning live wires into the street that we made, aglow in the anarchy." She’s resurrecting her independence. Part of this self-recognition involves rejecting the chaos of human emotions, which elevated "fucking out of anger" to cinematic glory. In its own way, the illusion makes for a more tawdry reality than this new frankness: "‘The sharks who eat themselves out,’ says Orson Welles, and I may not be now whole or especially in the pool of what was us but." In order to regain her independence, the narrator must divorce herself from that part defined by love, devoted to a self-destructive illusion. By invoking the lady from Shanghai, she’s able to rebel against the bad romance that’s defined her life, and distorted her nature. The dismissal of this dream provides a brilliant ending:" That’s another language, out of character, Chinese theater, and all the betrayals finally belong. To me." As with other movie poems in the collection, Greenberg draws on the fleeting reality of the experience, enshrining and then exorcising it to reaffirm the permanence of the self.
        Overall, Given offers refreshing insights, wit, and enough experimentation to keep the reader off guard. The most striking poems present personal experience in a surreal setting, and demonstrate a deep, sometimes fierce playfulness toward the authors of suffering. As a woman, the narrator defies the male construction of her by inverting it, and releasing a controlled chaos. The fundamental issues transcend gender, taking up the question of how we find ourselves in lovers and old toys. Greenberg refuses to be overwhelmed by the past, and puts its agents to work. Even the poems which confront deep issues maintain a sense of play. The flat notes come when the emotional risk of the poem is too low for Greenberg’s kinesis to really take hold. In "[untitled]," one wonders what wet dogs have to do with making out, and how much the narrator really cares. Such instances are rare, though. Greenberg succeeds in framing deep issues, recreating lost images, and twisting our views of poetic potential.