A Review by Julia Madsen

Marco Maisto’s entrancing debut collection, Traces of a Fifth Column, is like a Moebius strip of field recordings playing backwards and forwards and backwards again in real/reel time, a sort of hypnotic-dream-machine or cassette-tape-manifesto unspooling bombastic avalanches of feeling. In this collection, any semblance of the real is infinitely mediated and remediated, and other worlds spin out of the detritus. Maisto is interested in the so-called natural history and emotional landscape of conceivable worlds, paying close attention to the way in which artifacts infect/weather other artifacts. Always centralizing documentation, Maisto invites readers to consider the way both medium and message degrade over time:

The book, as an object and artifact given over to transformation in the reader’s hands, provides space for “unauthorized” and transgressive meanings/interpretations, quintessentially (and rather exquisitely) fulfilling Roland Barthes’s notion of the writerly text. The collection’s delicately rendered visuals and concrete poetry, too, add fruitful and ambiguous (in the best sense) dimensions to an overall exceptional text that at once invites and resists interpretation, celebrating openness over closure. Truly, there’s nothing quite like it.

This is a book of starts, attempts, and experiments, beginning with the framing of the book as a found notebook (discovered “in a guestroom of the guesthouse”) entitled The Octavo of Human Landscapes & Homecoming Emergency Tones. This homecoming emergency bordering on fugue bordering on joyride bordering a dream traces and documents the emotional landscape of worlds, including the speaker’s home place located in the Midwest. In “[annotated field guide]” Maisto writes,

Maisto’s emphasis on presence and pastness questions preconceived notions of ourselves and at once displaces readers from and draws them into landscape. In this context, the Heartland emerges as a zone of enchantment and erasure:

I step into the grain elevator half expecting my name to fall off. These are the plaids of my countryscape: easy blues and buckwheat blurs. This is my skeleton. Whale ivory mixed with landlocks, hay, soy. My name falls off.

Maisto’s vibrating lyricism highlights place and experiences of place, illuminating “my inner experience of this place given form.” Maisto writes, “[when] you are a part of every most important thing that happens in a place, gets to be you understand that place from a sort of cosmic perspective — but no other. I am as a map feels.” In this human cartography of region, the speaker, a nomad in his home territory, transgresses borders and limits while offering translations of the heartland forever echoing a void. The speaker “homecome[s] more complicated,” knowing that “[this] will take time.” Maisto states, “[my] impression of each place is the sum of my feelings about its name, that bundle of fleeting associations and dissolving pictures that falls to the ground when I shake the word by its trunk.”

On this simultaneously psychic and physical terrain, fleeting associations and artifacts magnetize toward one another as they dissolve and dissipate. Enigmatic word-strings and associations heighten connection, possibility, energy, delirium, and transformation:

hot homemade movie

cassette-tape grey orchid

horizonless footnote

torch party orchid

heart-attack leafpile

so I can catch you

irrepressible measure

so I can catch you

who are you not

navy blue halfday

torch-party driveway

In Traces of a Fifth Column, things couple desirously with other things, holding that “desire will be the beginning of us.” For Maisto, desire is the beginning of the archive, a light that makes love with words and worlds, and even when our efforts at documentation worsen we know undoubtedly that we’re alive because we crave connection. The collection’s epistolary fragments encircle the halved space of the dash and ampersand, the place where things endlessly come and become together. In “(Day 2)” Maisto writes,

Dear Ochre Oleander, Dear Heartbeat, Dear Blonde Avalanche, Dear Drunk Summer Gravel, Dear Hide-&-Soft, Dear Raft, Dear Crystalline Z, Dear Teary Peninsula, Dear Fractal-Silo, Dear Secret Voice, Dear Bluest Bird, Dear Barometer, Dear Poisoner’s Explanandum, Dear Unfixed Depth-of-Field, Dear Field-Within-A-Field,

Let’s say never, but mean later.

What is the form of the letter, if not a desire for connection? Maiso states, “you don’t just get to just desire me / you get to have to tear apart the / landscape that enfolds me.” The heat behind these fragments arises from an emotional impulse that attempts to grasp place knowing that we can never really regain it. From this void emerges landscapes real, imagined, and impressionistic, and in this sense Traces of a Fifth Column becomes a sort of docu-fantasy of landscape. Here the almost otherworldly, almost ghostly speaker proffers readers the gift of luminescence, vision, and irradiant expression: “I murmur blood magic into your ear . . . liberated particles. salt air. sodium light. dusk.”

Julia Madsen is a multimedia poet and educator. She received an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and is currently a doctoral student in English/Creative Writing at the University of Denver. Her first book, The Boneyard, The Birth Manual, A Burial: Investigations into the Heartland, is available from Trembling Pillow Press.

Marco Maisto is a slipstream poet and audiofiction creator based in New York City. He heads up Rogue Signal Studios, a media collective for misfit podcasts, electronic art, and cryptogeneric marginalia.

Marco Maisto’s Traces of a Fifth Column and the Docu-Fantasy of Landscape was originally published in Anomaly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.