For the Birds: Poets I recommend: yvette nepper
Author of "everything i ever wanted was inside my personality" (Bottlecap Press, 2024)
Happy Poetry Month, friends!
Today I’m sharing a ~highly poetic~ review of yvette nepper’s chapbook, “everything i ever wanted was inside my personality,” newly out from Bottlecap Press. I encourage you to buy a copy!
If you’re feeling frisky, you can add my own chapbook—currently on sale for my birthday month (!!)—to the very same cart.
Whenever I read yvette nepper’s poetry, I feel as if I’m being nudged to look at real things directly. No more filtered sepia crap, just real colors and the real people who embody & wear them:
"they call themselves plaza rats because they hang-out in the plaza after business hours doing nothing but leaning on cars and smoking cigarettes to watch them lean is to watch them explain the chaos of the universe through their human nature"
“Nudge” really is the perfect word for it, that hugging-prodding feeling I get when a poem shows me its sincerity and its intelligence at the same time—when it reminds me that all my favorite human qualities are not in competition with each other—without insisting on exactly what the poem means or how I should read it.
Poem as suggestion, not obligation.
Poem as gentle elbow against the side of my arm, that good feeling when someone says, “hey, I think you’ll really like this…”
Not just someone seeing you, but someone seeing your heart and the direction they think it probably points in, and then taking the time to consider both—you, your pointing heart—at once.
yvette’s poems say, hey, I think you’ll really like this, and then they point at things I like and love. They show me sentences I become enamored with:
"i accept all the cookies tonight from the longitude of this nightgown ready to decompress in a way that only i can refusing to acknowledge the tentative violence of the state while falling asleep to frasier and waking up to catheter commercials"
Poem as funny bone, and funny feeling, and funny heart.
When I read yvette nepper’s poetry, I see things that make me want to keep looking, and so I do.
What do I see?
I am peering across the landscape of the 1970s, looking for some kind of origin story.
The origin of our bodies becoming like machines.
The origin of queer desire expressed.
The origin of a certain iteration of nostalgia, the most iterative of all human feelings.
The origin of the beginning of the end of concepts like sufficiency, or guarantee.
Nothing is guaranteed any longer in this modern world but poetry. Whether you are a poet are not will determine how you feel about my saying that.
“my hands are the size of machines / they keep saying.” Everything changes, morphs, grows missable. I miss my smaller, human-sized hands sometimes, the ones made for holding chapbooks, not for restacking digital posts to encourage other people to restack the same digital posts, so that they’ll read my posts about wanting to have my posts read, which helps me earn money so I can keep creating products and asking for money for them.
“money is the bird that either flies or stays put.”
I miss a lot of things.
The only constant in life is the feeling I get—tiny pebbles in my sternum—when I read good poetry.
There is no algorithm for this. I have to feel it, notice it, and then decide for myself.
When I read yvette nepper’s poetry, I remember how much the feeling, noticing, and deciding matter. For a moment, I no longer fear the algorithm because (for a moment) I no longer care about the algorithm (you have to care about the things you’re scared of). Everything feels possible again. “the skills that i build in meditation are transferable, the skills that i / build in meditation will look good on a resumé.”
I didn’t say, optimistic. I said: possible.
This moment feels possible, transferable.
Poetry feels possible, transferable.
I feel nostalgic for this moment—a good skill to have—which is not to say that I feel truly present in it, that all my transferable skills have indeed transfered, but simply that their go bags are packed and by the door.
They could transfer in a moment’s notice.
They’re just waiting for the right one.
Good poems make you more aware of the waiting, and more suspicious of the right.
Good poems make you long for what you already have, including:
-all your feelings
-a quality of understanding that grows without turning concrete
-a relationship with the world that doesn’t quit
-your personhood, which always means something even when it doesn’t make (neurotypical) sense
Feelings are moments, and this one will change, and I’m okay with that, or I’m practicing being okay with that. Feelings are practices, not masters. (More verb than noun.)
“i can’t be limited by the very extreme,” yvette nepper writes.
Thank gawd.
Let’s talk for a moment about she:
"she can count to ten / she can run on fumes / she can dance all night at unprecedented speed"
But who is she?
Is she the history of words?
Is she meaning, incarnate?
Does she experience her own multiplicity of self-meaning as confusing and whackadoodle?
I hear Sylvia Plath whispering in the background of these poems—particularly “JAZZ,” the long poem that arrives shortly beyond the halfway point of the chapbook.
Plath wrote: “How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?”
nepper wrote: “i can’t be limited by something that was believed / to be the case, / but is not the case.”
When I read yvette nepper’s poetry, I feel intellectually gutted.
Did you know that the word, gutted, can be traced back to the Old English word for, pour?
When I read yvette nepper’s poems, my favorite part is the way the writing pours my thoughts and feelings right out of me; pebbles in my sternum, and now they’re on the ground.
This is an experience well worth having.
"and it's always worth it, to collect friends at this speed in fact, that's it, that's the whole story, the entire mythos it's just some artists, bumping into one another on the street saying, 'how's your opera coming along?'"
Order “everything i ever wanted was inside my personality,” by yvette nepper, here.
Thank you for helping me love poetry and not feel that I need to be a "real" poet to enjoy, or understand what the poet is saying. But instead invite the poem to open me to new possibilities and make my own meaning.