Review by Julia Lisella
Dorian Elizabeth Knapp asks the questions everyone is thinking—what is poetry in the age of AI? What is poetry in the face of a dying planet? What is poetry at the cusp of a democracy in grave danger? Causa Sui, Knapp’s third full-length collection and winner of the Three Mile Harbor Press Poetry Prize, is equal parts funny and deadly serious, and the stakes are always high.
Underlying many of the poems in this collection is the deep anxiety over what Knapp refers to in her poem “Negative Capability” as “the great drag show of humanity” (17)—what does it mean to be human in a world that seems to be attempting to diminish our best efforts to remain genuine, empathic, and good? The poems sing with controlled rage at what we’ve allowed the world to become. In “It’s Okay to Worry about the State of Britney Spears’s Mental Health,” the book’s opening poem, the speaker warns us that we’ll be undone by the world’s mess, which is of course of our own making, our Causa Sui. Playing on our obsessive celebrity culture, the speaker likens Britney first to a “synecdoche here, a part standing in / for a whole, & further, a metonym, / When she becomes the woman // who represents all women / enslaved, abused, & silenced / by the patriarchy…” and then in a tour de force observes:
This metaphor could be stretched
even further to mean Britney
equals the earth in crisis – melting
polar caps & biblical floods—
while we burn down its forests
& poison its rivers, & then
like Jamie Spears, demand that it sing.(3)
In a series of poems that run throughout the collection, Knapp requests ChatGPT generate poems “in the style of” country songs, Greek myths, and artist statements. By boldfacing singular words within the texts Knapp reveals skeletal poems or utterances that manage to read as both bland and true. For example, in “Poem in the Manner of a ChatGPT Poem Titled “Katabasis” we are left with: “through / forms / I / discover / my / power” (11), and in “The Myth of Orpheus & Eurydice as a ChatGPT Country Song” we end up with “He / took /the / lie / of / his / song / & / turned / her into / legend” (18). Perhaps the most biting and inventive one is “Poem in the Manner of a ChatGPT Artist’s Statement” where a page of Chat-GPT generic prose posing as an artist’s statement is reduced to “my / sense / is / that / I / inhabit / spaces /that / transcend / the / human” (79). Even in its sarcasm the poem underscores its own sadness over lost language, lost art, lost meaning.
In the section titled “We the People”: Found Poems from Project 2025” Knapp rivals auto-generated text by creating chilling poems out of a very bitter found text. The poems here are composed entirely of language taken from the Project 2025 document. These spare lyrics expose the Project’s nefarious intentions. In “Regarding Race” Knapp not only reveals the racism at the heart of Project 2025’s insistence on dismantling DEI policies, but what is truly at stake for humanity by doing so:
Regarding race
we are colorblind
We reject the idea
of racism We replace
it with a black hole
in which we place
our dead Two
coins cover their
eyes Two coins
In the midst of this modern-day American jeremiad of political parody, clever cultural observations, and a plea for us to pay attention, there is “a place for the genuine,” too. In a series of contemporary sonnets, Knapp takes on the Supreme Court, the January 6th insurrection, and the power of poetry to keep us in the now with grace and powerfully sharp language. In “The Great Reset” she writes:
Let your mind be a woodland bird
with the world in its beak like a worm.
Then watch the sun carve a river
of blindness in the distance, as bombs
keep falling on the heads of the innocent.
How does one turn suffering into art?
Go ask the dead, who don’t need your
or anyone’s elegy. . . .(40)
Knapp takes on the modern world in all its sorrow and absurdities, and through humor and wisdom, mourns for all our futures.
Causa Sui
by Elizabeth Knapp
Three Mile Harbor Press, 2025, $18 [paper]
ISBN: 9798218706326
| Julia Lisella’s latest collection is Our Lively Kingdom (Bordighera Press), named a finalist in the 2023 Paterson Book Prize and Grand Prize Finalist and Poetry Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Other collections are Always, Terrain, and Love Song Hiroshima. Her work appears in The Common, Ploughshares, Nimrod, Pangyrus, MER and many others. She teaches at Regis College and co-curates the Italian American Writers Association Literary Reading Series in Boston. |