Untoward is a word. I never use.

The glaring contradiction, the sarcasm, the word play. The title poem of Claire Becker’s chapbook, Untoward, is placed fourteenth among seventeen poems. Long before this poem, Becker’s poetic voice, and the subjects of her poems, lean toward the untoward. If untoward isn’t in your daily lexicon–if it is a word you never use–here are the primary definitions as per Webster’s:

1: difficult to guide, manage, or work with: UNRULY, INTRACTABLE  2  a: marked by trouble or unhappiness: UNLUCKY  b: not favorable: ADVERSE, UNPROPITIOUS

Marked by trouble? Yes. Linguistic, semantic trouble. Throughout the chapbook, we meet Becker’s penchant for clever contradiction and irony. In the poem Three Easy Sentences, she masterfully blurs the antecedent to his.

A new presidential program
is prayer, so god punishes.
God prefers a whole sentence,
which can contain both helicopters
and their nations. His sentences
end with periods that come after
storms, which are introduced by commas.

And so the question: Are his sentences the president’s, or god’s? Difficult to say, though according to the poem’s title, these are ‘three easy sentences.’

In Boars’ Ears, Becker again employs the use of double (or triple) entendres. Near the end of the poem comes the looming question:

         Have you decided?

Decided what? We’re in the midst of a restaurant’s lunch rush, and our narrative voice is that of a (self-conscious, poetically-distracted) waitress, so perhaps the question is simply: Have you decided what to order? Or, referring to an earlier question posed in the poem: Have you decided whether waitresses are nincompoops or poets? Which then suggests, most importantly, what have you decided, fundamentally, about me?

In Human Is Animal, Animal Is Back, Becker writes: That’s a wish that precedes an earthquake/...Plates/ should get shuffled in the hearth...

Shuffled in the earth? No, shuffled in the hearth. This is signature Becker. To make a small change, in this case one letter, which diverts the poem in an unexpected direction.  With these quick linguistic flicks, the poems can become untoward, in the sense that they are difficult to guide. They defy.

While the language-play stirs questions and surprises, we’re sure about our physical location. Many poems are clearly Californian. We’re on the bus, on the ferry, commuting across the Bay, we are in Mission Dolores Park. There’s smog, and, of course, the earthquake, the shuffled plates.

If Becker is honest about her age in the poem Claire Becker, 25, we’ve learned that she’s at the beginning of her writing life. In some cases, Becker’s slippery language comes across as a deliberate poetic device; in other places it’s subtle and productive. As she continues to hone her craft, we can expect more of her satisfyingly intractable poems.