Review: Field Notes from the Undead by Asa Boxer

Asa Boxer’s Field Notes from the Undead, a chapbook of zombie and vampire poems, makes a distinction early on between the two kinds of viral undead. Zombies, it says, “cluster according to the algorithm of mobs, / of rain gathering into hail, of coagulating blood. // Whereas vampires are independent thinkers. ”In this sense at least, Boxer is all vampire. His thinking is unreservedly independent. Unlike most poets who see chapbook publishing as a step toward a book-length deal, Boxer began with book-length titles but now chooses to work instead with chapbook presses like Anstruther Press and Frog Hollow. In a genre that tends toward obscurity and elitism, Boxer writes with directness and is as happy to have his poetry on a t-shirt as in a book. Boxer is no mob-following zombie, and Field Notes from the Undead is similarly determined to avoid the algorithm of the mob. The volume is published by the Elora Poetry Centre, an arts organization and micro-press run by Carol Williams and Daniel Bratton. Williams makes each book by hand at the kitchen table, using beautiful papers and an accordion style binding. Copies are available only at the Centre itself, just outside of Elora. There’s no risk of zombie mobs here. The book might infect you, but you’ll need to get close enough for a vampire’s intimate bite. The poetry itself is playful, mining the language and imagery of our culture’s decades-long obsession with the undead, all the while noting the obvious ways that device addiction, consumerism, and political passivity have created a zombified populace. The collection begins with a piece called “iTard,” which describes the typical device zombie. This is the sort of person that a later poem, “Sensitive Ears,” sums up as, “zombie: earbuds, thumbs at a laptop.” Another piece, “Zombie Apocalypse,” imagines a world where an undead plague becomes normalized into suburban life. People start buying smelly cheese “to excuse that smell.” Committees are formed to grant “social aid / for those requiring nose jobs, tummy tucks, and reconstruction.” The final poem features an evil Santa using devices to lure children into slavery in his northern workshops. There’s a real sense in all this that Boxer is having his fun, poking around at the deformities of our viral culture.

This playfulness, however, is always undercut by an equally strong sense that, however we dress it up, we’re all still just walking dead ...

This playfulness, however, is always undercut by an equally strong sense that, however we dress it up, we’re all still just walking dead—socially, politically, economically—even if most of us don’t realize it yet. Two of the poems are subtitled “After Solzhenitsyn,” another “After Thucydides.” Many of Boxer’s poems take their underlying sensibilities from these two influences: Solzhenitsyn’s bleak social commentary and Thucydides fear-and-self-interest-driven political realism. In “Zombie Code,” the mob tears apart the first of their own to stop applauding their leader. In “Zombie Genius,” those who are unbitten mimic the bitten so closely that they end up indistinguishable. Boxer may be inviting us to laugh at the absurdities of our condition, but the laugh is a cynical one. Only a single poem in the collection seems to offer a way out of our undead condition. Boxer uses “The Ghoul Guard” to describe those curious few who won’t turn undead no matter how often they’re bitten. Though they’re shunned and made to feel insane, they are the sort “that snaps / the chain in the teeth of the winch.” This poem, like all the others, seems resigned to the fact that we’ll all be bitten, because none of us can escape the viral contagion of our culture. But it also suggests we might hope for some few who will remain at least partly immune, who will resist the algorithm of the mob. In an undead world, maybe there will be a few who don’t just achieve the independent thinking of the vampire, but salvage something of the human.