In an age of fractured attention spans–where conversation is modeled after Friends episodes and commercial jingles–the poems of Malinda Markham are especially exciting for the manner in which they focus on details. Her first book, Ninety-Five Nights of Listening, is a chronicle of the disjointedness of self in another culture, and her patience for listening closely is rewarded with a sustained attentiveness to the things that matter most. These are poems of precision, poems that simultaneously reveal and conceal the poet’s vision in a too-quickly moving world.
           In fact, Markham’s ability to see things vividly complements her ear for language. In "Things That Seldom Remain in Place," Markham introduces the surrealist’s version of things, a common approach in the book:

Ghosts peel from the wallpaper. They turn to foxes,
run red to the trees. Weather knots
at the corners of sleep and will not recede.
Who can see a stranger’s wrist
and not have regrets? The scent of wild orange
invokes memory benign: sliced lime
calls forth pleasing thoughts best forgotten.

In its itch to cover the gamut of sensual experience, this poem risks becoming obtuse. However, there is a moment in line four, where the poet steps away from the strangeness of her imagination to ask an important question. In a manner much like James Wright, Markham has the ability to assess where the poem needs an interruption–when the narrative frame, albeit tenuous, would benefit from a short break. "Things" continues to work in this way, becoming a "spectacle of disbelief" from which it is impossible to turn one’s gaze: "The sun, too, is a taken thing. Across an ocean/ a man’s sister stops speaking,/ leaving this voice to stand for everything lost."
           Markham’s voice throughout Ninety-Five Nights is highly tuned to the pitch of loss, but explores it in a way that eschews the crimes of confessionalism. Rather than asking the "I" to talk its way out of memory, the poet relies on the objects around her–from "a ribbon nailed on the door" to the "shadows hanging carefully on the trees–" to speak from the past. It is as though Markham requires some external evidence of the world to assure herself–and her audience–that what she remembers is real:

And it isn’t summer,
but it could be, there. Can you hear the words
between them, slicing foliage
off trees, but gently,
accosting the air for what it has not given,
what it cannot commend.

In "What Magnitudes Sing Us," Markham "commends" language, its ability to bind her to objects as a way to map memory’s territory. In this passage, the poet first gives words a physicality that influences both a literal and figurative space. The force of the slicing, for example, begins "gently," but quickly moves to a more violent "accosting," speeding up the poem’s breath and adding complications to the setting Markham has thus far created.
           Beyond the sheer physicality of her poems, though, Markham relies on bending the rules of time to move in and out of remembered moments. Because many of her poems are designed as voices for those without a voice–particularly women in the Japanese culture of which she has become part–the poet is required to reach back in history. In "Museum Rehearsal," these voices meld together in a lyrical strain that moves comfortably between past and present, between fiction and fact:

In Japan, a man imagines snow.                                        Remember
The bulbs, sent from another country, doomed to break
Black tulips, bred into submission. How a flower can furl
                                                  A circle that small.
                                               Cut open slightly
With a knife, would sound escape? Would life,
In all its jars? All the waking dreams of breath in another country,
A white bed stiff with sheets. What exactly holds

In this section, the white space acts as a measure of time, ticking off the moments between speculations, which come to the narrator with the clarity of images suddenly illuminated as if by bursts of lightning. As a result, the images accumulate meaning and resonance much in the way that frames in a film do: from one cinematic innerscape to another, Markham moves time forward.
           Moving her poems this way, Markham can acknowledge the fractures of modern life, but can also reach back into history and offer both figures and landscapes freedom from silence. The movement of other lives–from a retired geisha to a mother bemoaning her daughter’s inability to get married–becomes the background for poems that sustain the lyrical, sometimes painful pitch of being. Ninety-Five Nights of Listening is filled with sounds that until Markham points them out to us, we have failed really to notice; when the listening begins in earnest, the facts of the world become plain: "The sky is silenced:/ We cannot move, who gauge our way by stories/ lit above our heads."