“The Contaminants” begins, “ Because Nazi venom had seeped into our very thoughts, every true thought was a victory … Speaking of seepage… Something had gotten into the water … some kind of chemical… poison… or just the sun…” Here the seriousness of the opening phrases (from Sartre) contrast with the speaker’s comic, physical “Speaking of seepage.” But Dennigan ratchets back up the stakes of the poem immediately by introducing the suggestion of “poison” in the water. Dennigan could have made these opening quotations into epigraphs, or attributed them in footnotes or endnotes as it is, their tones and intentions bleed into those of her speakers. Each of the prose poems begins with an unattributed literary quotation, set off only by an ellipsis.

Most of the poems here include repurposed and re- or mis-contextualized material from other (usually literary) sources. The italicized quotation that starts “The Other Forest” comes from The Brothers Karamazov, but the sense of its having come from elsewhere is what feels most relevant to Madame X. They can connote elements of tone like a voice drifting off, pausing, or stuttering, like the speaker’s halting “Why had I … I hadn’t meant … !” in “The Speechmaker.” In poems like “The Shooter” and “The Drought,” which have a strained or particularly complex relationship to reality, the clots of ellipses come to feel particularly restricting, tense, or anxiety inducing they create a sense of space that after some repetition feels screechingly artificial, desperately limiting. Besides using ellipses as a kind of de facto line break, Dennigan uses ellipses to denote a change in speaker or, in the opening of the poem “The Other Forest,” the same speaker addressing a different audience: ‘ To insects-sensual lust … was how I began my talk.’ Dennigan’s ellipsis can mean that a word has been elided or interrupted, as in the wonderful poem “The Existentialist,” where the speaker wonders “Okay why does the Columbiney kid have his hand in his breast pock …?” Elsewhere ellipses stand in place of other punctuation marks like periods or commas. Her ellipses can carry any number of meanings, and it is fascinating to discern the ways in which those meanings come to light on these poems’ narrative surface.

Dennigan uses the prose poem to rethink the ellipsis and the ellipsis to rethink the prose poem. Many of the poems in Darcie Dennigan’s brash, flexible, strongly voiced second book, Madame X (Canarium Books, 2012), take the form of hearty chunks of ellipsis-ridden prose. (Canarium Books: 2012.) Reviewed by Lucy Biederman Recommended Books Madame X by Darcie Dennigan