Monkey Ranch
Author: Julie Bruck
I shouldn’t admit this as book reviewer – but I chose to read Julie Bruck’s Monkey Ranch purely based on its cover. Would you ignore a book if the cover features a picture of a brown-eyed monkey wearing a dress and a silly hat? I say nay. No one’s heart is that ironclad.
Bruck, an expert cover-chooser, also happens to be a talented poet – a performer of a linguistic balancing act between darkly ironic histories and the ridiculous truths found in them. Monkey Ranch is a book of dichotomies: human versus nature, history versus future, chaos versus order. In of all these themes, Bruck often arrives at humourous, tragic, and paradoxical endings.
In the case of animalism, an overwhelming topic of the collection, Bruck questions what it means to be caged, as in her description of “The Mandrill’s Gaze” seen at the zoo:
Above his Bastille Day snout, the mandrill’s
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Hazel eyes are small, deep-set, and when
he fixes them on yours, I dare you,
turn away.
Here, the animal behind the cage is the one in control on a metaphysical level – the monkey “fixes” our gaze. We are drawn to the potential of the creature’s humanistic mechanisms, which Bruck compares to that of a child, one that will never grow older or lose its innocence.
The early poems employ these types of image reversals: the human labourer is conditioned to serve in “Goodwill”; the elderly, suffering from dementia, are made out as lost animals in “Missing Jerry Tang”; our bodies are “frail containers” holding what makes us human – our inclination for violence and our delicacy, as in the pleadingly-titled “Please”. These poems make us wonder if we are perhaps safer isolated from one another, as in “Islands”, in which Bruck describes the sadly blissful side of mental numbness:
A palsied man shuffles past the window,
drool swinging from his chin; the street
steams after rain. Certain afternoons
are islands.
Bruck seems to suggest, in the words above and the aptly named “How to Be Alone, the dark desire to be detached in the twenty-first century. In this time, there is an inclination towards hyper-connectivity, Bruck affirms. Sound bites from September 11, 2001, school shootings, the global financial crisis, and Middle-Eastern strife are heard throughout.
Bruck’s twenty-first century is one of noise – Monkey Ranch’s rhythms and speech howls and shrieks like that of the its human subjects, their city-spaces, and TVs. Take this cacophonic, alliteration-packed excerpt in “Please”:
Keep them inside:
the matriarch’s white waves, pink scalp
showing through, and this morning’s student
blue streaks above her midterm on compassion.
Those sounds are all-the-more brilliant draped in splashes of colour found on Bruck’s personas, who want to look human, but are never quite tame. The world is bright, the world is loud in the Monkey Ranch.
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