We first encountered the work of Hannah Brooks-Motl at a reading in the grotto-like basement of Von bar in the Bowery. Admittedly disenchanted by contemporary poetry at the time, we had been suffering between copies of Spinoza’s Ethics (with help from Deleuze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy) and Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, each of which offered minimal rewards for the massive efforts of attention and comprehension they required. Perhaps we were trying to liquify our years of spiritual bankruptcy, or worse, gamify our intelligence, but the weeks of slogging through impenetrable definitions, axioms, scholia, and corollaries had exhausted us to the point of needing poetic intervention––a peregrine falcon out of a beehive, the sound of a cascade on Madison Avenue, something both incommensurable and complete. When Hannah began to read the titular poem from Ultraviolet of the Genuine, we received exactly that: 

This is a story about
Being told on two levels

It has good bones, no bones––a minimum
Of advantages 

It’s got a garden path
At the height of summer, a little after

Pyramids of flowing pain

Brooks-Motl constructs the terms of her universe with images that are not immediately conceivable, but offer guidance towards their conceivability. There are contradicting realities, which are relieving, as this feels truer to our experience, if not downright virtuous. The reader is situated in a locus of activity both descript and oblique. We do not know what constitutes the structure of her language (itself a location) but are enticed by the painterly discourse between the concrete and the abstract. Brooks-Motl does not let any image remain reified, but alters each with quick, flowy modifications. Good bones turn to the absence of bones, which are treated with equal foundational value. The garden path is located in two simultaneous and distinct temporalities. The familiar signifier of the pyramid is made more obtuse by its flowing pain, which elicits a creative response from the reader to complete the image. We appreciate poems that are not didactic, which is to say, totalitarian. We resist poems that instruct towards a specific goal of interpretation. We resist poems that seek to “correct” ideology, and which, in themselves, are ideological. And so we are invigorated when Brooks-Motl does none of these things, but leaves the poem open as a space of both personal and idiosyncratic communion. Where this poem arrives is stunning: 

A theory peaked 
I think I was free there
Holding a goblet

One mutating afternoon
That’s not personal, anecdotal 

It just contributes 
Whatever I say intentionally

That’s about rhythm
I’ll begin again

Here, the creative (personal) and the theoretical (impersonal) arrive in mutual solidarity, even though the speaker resists arrival. The freedom of the speaker exists somewhere in the liminal, perhaps where theory is being processed and interpellated, before it becomes propagated. This liminal space feels like the excitement and surprise of learning, when understanding is preverbal, perhaps a flash of color in the consciousness, and so requires rereading, repetition, a conclusion that also serves as a beginning. 

Brooks-Motl takes the title of her book from the language of Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia, a Marxist interpretation of Western civilization through the framework of revolutionary cataclysms and rhapsodic meditations. While we are not scholars of Bloch’s work, we imagine the average reader of this collection also has not, and thus struggle with how much research to invest given the nominal importance of Bloch’s Utopia. Where we landed is perfunctory at best, but important if only for lay contextualization of Brooks-Motl’s poems. “I am. We are,” begins Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia. “That is enough. Now we have to begin. Life has been put in our hands. For itself it became empty already long ago.” While Bloch’s statements around origin may seem elliptical at first, he continues his objective to address the various crises of our historical amnesia resulting in unwieldy imperial power, coercion of the petit bourgeoisie, degradation of universities, arts, and spirit, which all culminates with an enervated (if not demolished) civilization. The poems of Ultraviolet of the Genuine ostensibly continue Bloch’s discourse from the originary through his revolutionized conclusion: “incipit vita nova.” Brooks-Motl’s work constructs for the reader a new world where everything we encounter feels as ancient as it does contemporary, as if she has located the vital, metaphysical thread that unites and liberates us from our own imperious inclination to define and destroy ourselves. 

The poem “Bowl of Fruit” brims with this same intention: 

Bitter is important to our bodies
I am only interested in true statements now

Everything coming into contact with 
the story is legitimate as well as bitter 
and goes from mouth to anus––
chicory   artichoke 
citrus       red wine

passing through this chain reaction
there are no false ideas 

Brooks-Motl frames the concept of truth through a somatic system of digestion, which cannot have a pretense. However, it is immediately clear that she is not only discussing the facts of the body, as there seems a vital importance inherent in how we narrativize experience. The testament to the facticity of digestion then moves into a question of elegy, with the speaker looking for a similar logic of interiority, with the conclusion that the systems we use to express the facts of our bodies, or their loss, are invented. While there is a refreshing reliability to our biological facts, we are not self-satisfied as mere eating and shitting organisms. “I would be lost without ideas,” the speaker says, “so I wander the breezeway mentally / in search of competent detail plus mystery / stale and definite / belonging somewhere”. Brooks-Motl does not let the poem land in a clearly delineated or affirmative space but continues to push against its grey matter. Here again she oscillates between the abstract and the concrete, the certainty of detail obfuscated by mystery, the rigidity of staleness and definition made insecure by displacement. The space of the body and the space of the mind are ontically cohabitational, and so it makes sense that Brooks-Motl continues to meander between the two, or interrogate their phenomena simultaneously. While we can scientifically express our biological processes, be they digestive, gustatory, or synaptic, the possibility of the poem is to extrapolate those processes in estranged terms, to examine what narratives emerge from their lacunae. “Bowl of Fruit” utilizes a mesmerizing discourse between these attributes wherein the reader is tasked to reconcile how the meanings of the body inform our communication with ideal, Platonic structures from the ground to the firmament. Is our living a kind of mirror that reflects or refracts the systems that may be used to incarcerate us, or enervate us, or even emancipate us? “Can you argue with utopia’s functional structure?” Brooks-Motl asks, somewhat rhetorically, perhaps already knowing that we cannot. 

The strengths of Ultraviolet of the Genuine lie in Brooks-Motl’s ability to expeditiously take the reader from a pragmatic definition to its richer abstract. We are  reminded of Spinoza who does quite the inverse in his Ethics and gives the reader an abstract (sometimes elliptical) definition in order to later delineate an organizing metaphysical principle of God qua Nature. Brooks-Motl’s poems are also interested in providing an organizing principle (utopia) but through a process of sublimating, or decreating, the rational terms of the physical. 

Take the final poem of the book, one from a quintet of poems titled “Poverty Mountain”: 

Sleep in a field
Take off your clothes 
Psychically 
That’s probably 
What heaven means

Here, heaven (utopia) is not something or somewhere one arrives at, but a meaning that is transferred. Brooks-Motl’s language is intriguing in how she softens the didactic beginning of the poem with the adverbial, which both displaces the reader and reappraises the speaker’s certainty. What we thought was a physical location is revealed to be psychic. What we thought was instruction is revealed to be suggestion. These are the kinds of tensions between abstraction and concretion that permeate Ultraviolet, which may just be the foundational conundrum of utopia in and of itself. How can we draw a clear image of a concept that we can hardly conceive of? It is important that Ernst Bloch defines utopia as open-ended which formats its inherent beyond as a prerequisite to our comprehension. The poems in Ultraviolet, like that of “Poverty Mountain”, are continuously reaching towards their own beyond, never settling or stagnating in the destruction of ideological certainty. To sit with this book is to consort with the myriad possibilities of our being-in-the-world, beyond delimited spatial systems, beyond temporality, and ever toward our collective unfinished and radical process––our beyond.