The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 54 > Reviews >Matthew Gavin Frank's Sagittarius Agitprop

Sagittarius Agitprop
Matthew Gavin Frank
Black Lawrence Press
ISBN Number: 978-1-934703-55-7

Reviewer: Alice Osborn


          In Matthew Gavin Frank’s debut poetry collection, Sagittarius Agitprop, Frank uses words to root out the patterns and aberrations of nature and humanity. He takes on personal subjects, such as his infant daughter who speaks to whales and an elderly father who dearly favors his moose mug, and combines them with food and music imagery to produce a surreal mélange, like the spice in Dune. His couplets, line lengths, and dropped lines are all strictly premeditated, which makes his ecstatic word play even more dynamic and his voice even more resonant.

          We all know that Sagittarius is the half man, half horse archer who has a yearning for travel and exploration. He symbolizes our intellectual (human) and physical (animal) natures, as well as our search for wisdom. The word agitprop refers to Soviet propaganda. This is already an interesting juxtaposition, but then it gets stranger with the collection’s epigraphs from Apollinaire (“Love like a ponderous trained bear/ Danced upright at our slightest will”) and Mick Jagger (Oh daddy, be proud of your planet/ Oh mommy, be proud of your son”) on the same page.

          The “Sagittarius Agitprop” persona graces the pages in “Elegy for the Eunuch Sagittarius,” “Sagittarius at Dusk,” “Sagittarius Nocturne,” and “Sagittarius Does Syracuse.” In “Sagittarius, Sleeping,” the speaker and a mosquito intersect:

Under the blanket is not
the fable we expect, morality divined
from the blossoms
in the mattress.

You will dare to say
snowflake, then
orchid aloud
before the bathroom mirror, or
the reflection of the mirror in the wings
of the mosquito.

          By this point the reader has figured out that Frank’s alter ego is the Sagittarius Agitprop. Frank is himself a Sagittarius, and he is creating his own propaganda through a straightforward verse. Rather than being overly reliant on flourishes, Frank utilizes saturated nouns and verbs, adeptly employing pace and diction to further tone and meaning.

          Frank’s poems deliver on many different levels as humans, animals, and food combust and morph,  intersecting and merging in various ways. For instance, in the poem “Ossification,” the speaker demands detail and sincerity while plunging into an absurdity that somehow makes sense:

You say, art undresses life, shows us its nipples
and suckling pigs, exhumed from palm fronds
and leprosy. You say, it’s Easter Island
framed and hung with one gold nail in a beamless
wall. How does it stay up? How can the old man
with one leg not topple when the weather lights

his windbreaker on fire? … Be the giraffe.
I know it’s in you. Your mother had it. You bite
one side. I’ll bite the other. Meet you at the pit.
If the bomb rings while we’re eating, let the machine
Get it. At our windowsill, the potted basil attacks
the potted thyme. The winner goes home with the pig.

          One of my favorite lines in the entire collection is this poem’s last line: “Read me another chapter. Sing me to sleep. And this time,/ be specific.” Frank’s specificity is more severe than your average writer’s, and it’s as if he wants his readers to go through a certain imagistic turmoil before they land on the final line.

          Frank has worked in the food and wine industry for sixteen years, so it’s no surprise that food and drink play a large role in his poetry. You never know what to expect when reading any of Frank’s verses, and the titles give little clue as to what we may encounter. In “Sprouts,” a poem ostensibly about Brussels sprouts, things take a dark turn when the poem ends with a car accident. But before that, Frank completes a postmortem on the titular Brussels sprouts:

I like Brussels sprouts. There is something
even about them, as opposed to erratic, as opposed
to odd…

Architecturally-correct, each is a habitat
with staircases. Typically, I add only gray
salt (from Brittany), and cut it down the middle
with a butter knife. I always expect to find a fly
at its center, looking up at me with red eyes,
indignant that I’ve halved the work of its mother.

I eat their cores. I think of the brain
and its leaves. At rare times, like after
the Urbana chorus of cellos, or that time
when my brother, Ronald, went through
the windshield, I added the mustard.

          The poem “Saucer” is a tender portrait of the speaker’s father, who may be suffering from dementia or another debilitating disease.

Here is a saucer upon which my father’s head
pools like coffee. He’s beyond medication.
The hummingbirds have overtaken him, bricking
his smile with sugarcubes. When he speaks to me,
his tongue taps his teeth, a teaspoon gently ringing
the hour against the lip of his favorite mug. The one
I brought back from Alaska. The one with three
moose: mother, father, child. A cow, a bull, a twig
pulled from a nest, cracked with eggshell and cream.
I adjust his napkin. I bring him his coffee. In the bathroom,
a few hairs from his old beard still cling to the sink.

          As in “Saucer,” which uses the moose coffee mug as its central image on which to pin metaphors and meanings, the “The Dressmaker’s Dummy” symbolizes continuity in the speaker’s and his wife’s relationship. The antique dummy was a surprise find in a thrift store.

She stands

as if nobly eviscerated, rib-
cage inflated as a balloon, a balloon’s

skeleton, a mold, a blueprint, this headless,
limbless torso graces the wall

…

        She lies
on her side in the trunk. She is scarily
dependable. A small nail later, a delicate

hammering later, she hangs, always
hangs as we twirl our fettuccine, as we

undress and love and argue, as we fork
the meat of all dinners

into our excited mouths.

          Frank is wise to use food as a link between all of his poems; food is sensual, it evokes memories, and everyone has a food memory since everyone eats. But many of his food images are carnivorous, Promethean, and savage. Even the Brussels sprouts are eaten as if they are a raw meat being consumed by a voracious animal. Frank crafts his images in this manner in order to provoke the reader into thinking about humanity, mortality, and nature’s caprices. Of course, these subjects are not new to poets, but Frank manages to insert fresh word play and geometry into his collection, which, overall, borrows the best qualities of both narrative realism and pure surrealism.
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