A really useful – if in one way bizarre (because completely gratuitous – I simply happened to be reading the two books at the same time) – contrast to the claustrophobia that o’erwhelmed me in Chernoff’s Among the Names, is Rodrigo Toscano’s Partisans. Like Names, Partisans is a short book – 49 pages of text – generously spaced to enable perfect binding. Like Names, Partisans is a single cycle – in this instance twelve poems constructed around a dozen grammatical tenses, treated here more as theoretical relations toward time, manifested through engagements with the seven basic pronouns. Where Chernoff falls back on a rich realm of reading (she offers two pages of notes, essentially a running bibliography), Toscano builds outward from these simplest materials – I, you, he, she, it, we & they – using line, ear (especially the doubleness of puns) to expand meaning. The result is that where Names feels constricted, almost airless by its end, Partisans feels open-ended, almost limitless in its horizon:

Present Perfect Progressive

Through weeks of exchanges
of speech

(and not only speech)

Between persons
toward objects

Between products
toward futures

At a time like this
but of the past
toward up ahead · here
up ahead · here

Worlds

As in a tangled net

These attempts at inquiry
as blades

Or treats
perhaps
as samplers
of wordwork

For handlers
of wordwork

Albeit
muster
spite

(if not comedy)

An extracted surplus
does
go somewhere

A surplus
transforming
does
cause something

Who’s been verbing
around noun-fields

Flouting history, rambling spleen’d
< a sign of Timidity >

Fumbling segues, trancing sex’d
< a sign of banality >

Spouting ethics, shunning touch
< a sign of Celebrity >

Sorting concepts, draping needs
< a sign of Obscurity >

Been reading "world"
through shards, reflexive
famed "fragments"

(as compelled to)

Non-collective
petty
rebellions

Nevertheless
how could one have them translate
another’s
mine to yours
yours to mine
ours to theirs
theirs · to who’s?

(and why would one care to know)

Collective Desire

Consider
what can be sparked
by something like
how have you been?

how have you been
is an initial
seemingly containable
question / greeting

Been

Partisans even approaches Chernoff’s own domain of gifts, but instead in terms of debt, bringing in IMF & the World Bank (with the implicit grammatical problem of how it is that developing nations never end up developed).

Partisans consequently is an engaged, even optimistic work. Strictly on its own terms, it’s a delight to read, sharp, witty, polyvalent. It’s taken me six years to get around to reading it, but leaves me hungrier than ever to read everything else Toscano produces.