The voice of Telegraph is one of determination and loss.  Throughout, Oakes writes of relationships held tenderly and then lost and of their visceral impact on a woman that survives, laments, and at times rejoices.  Oakes begins her book with a poem titled “Elektra in the Offices,” whose first lines are “Barefoot and ripe with new embarrassment / Elektra walks up three floors, trying not to sweat.”  This is a courageous beginning—all the connotations of “Elektra” spring to mind before the reader even finishes the first stanza.  This said, Elektra becomes our guide through these poems, and Oakes plays upon the many associations readers may attach to the name: woman as the “second sex,” difficult and often damaging relationships with men, family disharmony.  Careful readers may note however the acknowledgements thanking Frank Miller for inspiration with his comic Elektra Assassin.  This additional reference is not vital to the poems, but does add intriguing elements: the speaker in these poems and the comic book heroine have lived in hard times, have been hurt, yet continue to grow and maintain (a sometimes dangerous) agency in a life often steeped in disappointment.

Oakes writes of this existence, often balancing in these poems a linear narrative, while weaving in images that surprise, derange, and deepen the text.  Take for example these lines from “Rain in May.” The poem begins fairly straightforward:

Rain, we theorized as children

            was either god’s piss or

            his tears. Now when

            it falls from the night to

            the night it is sweat:

            alkaline, salt.

So far the poem demonstrates a good use of metaphor, but nothing yet is truly surprising.  The last stanza, however, begins to move in stranger and more interesting directions:

            Tension between raindrops—oracular space.

            The place where

            voices move—antelopes.

            Like worms turning in mulch, we

            sleep, the moisture

            sinking into our cheeks, our glands.

Suddenly a vivid blooming has occurred—the images are more disjunctive and direct.  One criticism this author has with the text ironically springs from what I like best: as I read the text, I continually looked forward to the next time the language would jump out of its skin and show me something new.

Most poems are lyric, leaning to longer lines and utilizing internal assonance and rhythm (“Awake in the back of a truck with a mouth full / of moss, the morning really an afternoon lost / a case of fireworks under the seat / Negro Modelo on the beach, bursting siphons of clams;” from “Always coming second”).  Interspersed, however, are prose poems. These poems are less charged than many of Oakes’ verse poems, and rely more on the story being told than on the language.  Indeed, I am not certain that some of these prose pieces would be considered poems—this sort of debate has gone on forever, but unlike the rest of Oakes’ text, the prose pieces lack the music, imagery, and engagement with language that many of her other poems demonstrate.

A great strength of this collection is its honesty, and how it deals with both the specificity and fluidity of memory.  Tableaus flicker in these poems—not hesitantly, but cinematically; locales and events are suggested, and then the narrative moves to the figures within.  “We hit this shoreline in darkness. To begin. / This is the half-reported note from land. No one/ here remembers their home country […]” (From “Reservoir”). The speaker in these poems often occupies a tentative landscape, one that won’t last.

Oakes is comfortable in this emergent and ephemeral landscape, and despite the many pitfalls and disappointments of the life contained in this book, she revels in the passion, persistence, and details of living.  Perhaps one of the best examples of this is from her poem “Threnos”:

            casting its back note, hooking

            my ankles to the floor; fires consuming

half of our city while we kiss through

bridges of unsteady song

oblivious to the universes

steadily being burned and born