Reviews of Distance Learning
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"Esbjerg harbor barges, Prince DK tobacco, orris root, oil of lemon, Topsy the Coney Island elephant electrocuted in 1903, ash cakes, barnacle knuckles, Corey's Slug and Snail Death––Angela Sorby's poetry loves a feel of dense pungent facticity and finds anxiety there in the way Robert Lowell's poetry does."

––Mark Halliday

Foreword by Mekeel McBride
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Angela Sorby is, in many respects, like a Sufi dancer who stops just long enough to send back news from her brilliant spiralings into the heart of things. Where you start in a Sorby poem is not where you end up, though everything connects. It's as if you've been shown how to reconcile San Francisco with Boston by unexpected meditations on a Midwestern prairie. You can get here from there but when you arrive, everything is changed. For instance, in "Timber Queen" you might think you're going to meet Sasquatch, the huge and elusive legendary beast of the Northwest but when he finally shows up, he turns out to be merely rat-sized. He carries a bunch of ferns to a former beauty queen who has clearly been doing some eating since the last pageant. And so the poem turns into a wry commentary on exaggeration and leaves us musing on myth's misshapen but strangely appealing children.

Sorby's is the poetry of fast-paced, brilliant connections, links and losses made manifest with impeccable and beguiling music. Her use of the colloquial is as crisp and infinity-tinged as a Hockney swimming pool. A quirky, intelligent humor often informs and reframes her most difficult subjects. Language, here, is always wry and energetic. Sometimes she enlists the tense delight of piled-on rhyme, as in the opening of "Synchronized Swimming":

How did decay work its way into the theater of water,
the Green Lake Aqua Stadium that was clear as chlorine
all through the fifties when Marilyns, Sues and Doreens

formed a human hula hoop of blues and greens?

Other times her language glows quiet and soft with the risky pleasure of picking up the elusive fingerprints of paradox. Then, the poetry's more likely to resort to some mesmerizing dance of assonance, slant rhyme, alliteration--the kind of motion that might lure a cobra right out of darkness for a dangerous kiss.

In fact, language or lack of it is often a concern in Sorby's work. The book's gorgeous first poem, "Glossolalia", concerns itself with the consequences of ecstatic utterances. A suburban neighbor tries to beguile the narrator into religion by praying in tongues. As she begins praying, her voice becomes "a plant/ forcing out blooms:// cinnamon spikes/ bees in the nightshade,// a foxglove fugue." This inspired and untranslatable music "veers" suburbia into "a garden/ overrun with wilderness." By the end of the poem, the narrator, asks "How could I not feel// Christ's knuckles rap/ hard on my heart?" a question tempered by preceding lines in which the narrator admits she's "fourteen and close// enough to touch Rae Anne's/ braids, her bangs,// her birch white hair part."

This may be as much feeling someone else's God knocking on her heart as it is a clear awareness of whose throat the music's emerging from. However you choose to read it, the fact remains that any good dictionary will yield up one origin of the word "God" to be "voice" which suggests that divinity of a sort might conceivably be linked with the ability to sing.

Distance Learning itself, is a renegade garden, rife with fierce music. Ms. Sorby's poems wake you up with surprising knocks to the heart. Music's everywhere here. It's a music that has learned its scales and suffered with the strict, frozen-spined metronome and now has earned its right to sassy jazz.

In "Kate Fox", a more complex look at language, Kate, a medium in the 1800s charged with fraud, admits that though she claimed to be talking to the dead, in fact, she learned, at an early age, "to crack my toe-bones until they echoed/ like raps from beyond the grave./ Soon my body was a bag of tricks." She devised this fraudulent medium-ship to liberate herself from the mindless work of endless sewing. By the end of the poem, Fox admits, "I was the whole/ heavenly host. I was as good as it gets." She speaks with irony, like a shyster shaking an empty sack in front of an unhappy customer. Still, a peculiar truth emerges, crackling with irony. Where else could the voices of the dead exist except inside the harmed and struggling bodies of those still alive?

Later, we encounter a man who claims to have given up language altogether in "The Man Without A Middle." When his heart feels too constricted, he removes it and buries it under a "maze of foxgloves." (The poem does not mention this but the heart stimulant digitalis is made from the foxglove plant so it's interesting to note that he's buried his heart where it has a chance of being healed.) He then fills his empty rib cage with birds because they "ask nothing" of him and "cannot be bothered with words." The aviary-hearted fellow laments, "So many things are more central than love." Still, he cannot help but admit that one of these things is the woman "in the park near the Gare St-Lazare...who scatters the bread." And of course, a kindness that translates into bread is just about as close to love as you can get.

Here, among other things, you will find this man with a heart made out of birds; Emily Dickinson, suddenly appearing as a twin to Marilyn Monroe; a UFO poem that turns out to be a searing, clear look at racism. This is a book of marvels and wonders, spangled bridges and blessedly safe parachutes. It is the poet, herself, who scatters a magic bread in the giving of these rich poems.