Reviews of Household Mechanics
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“Here there is a list and there is a life. A coming of age. Doubt. A taking apart. The dog. The girl scout in the tornado. Good intentions. There is something of Plath in these domestic meditations. Something of Stein. ‘you know you’ve seen that. and mashed potatoes like green waves.’”

—Laura Moriarty

Foreword by C. D. Wright
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Awareness begins at home, “eye level with the cake,” or so one could infer from Sarah Mangold’s Household Mechanics, a disquieting review of indirect disclosures, internal churnings, and palpable notions, subjected to a tense and skeletal language. She probes, evokes but chooses not to describe or elaborate. She ‘pulls across’ which she distinguishes from ‘associating with.’ The voice is consistent, distant. The sentence is disjointed; the thinking continuous.

None of us knows where poetry is going. Everyone who is undertaking to write it now is making their large or small machine out of ordered and scavenged parts. Reading Household Mechanics affords the experience of getting in, sometimes, falling in, and going forward, going somewhere. To go is key. To go is essential. The suitcases are permanently packed. “Reading homes explode.” The difficulties are not difficult to construe—in reading homes.

The subjective ground is respected and dissected, alternately and simultaneously. I could not tell you what is in that cake, but it keeps appearing. Of course it could be strategized another way, This is hers, her way “to get the boys to pass you the ball” among countless alternatives. Possibility holds a special place in Sarah Mangold’s book—for possibility can be seized upon by the “keenness of the third eye” or can be pluralized. Possibilities can create openings such as dream holes, which are not mentioned, but I am reminded of them, architecturally. Windows are perceived, punched out, where there were solid walls. And in landscape architecture, paths are worn, not where laid out, but by the walker. Dream holes, dream lines. Or perhaps in the poet Mangold’s case, “it’s more of a hope.” The opening she sees, the openings she creates are individualized units of hope.

When I think of an obvious alignment, I think of the Objectivists. Especially, the lone woman affiliated, the geographical isolate, Neidecker. I had always wished there were more of them, because they introduced a brand of lucidity, rare, oh rare in these dis-united states of poetry. This is “not an airshow.” This is household mechanics. This living; it takes a lifetime.

– C.D. Wright