Tussle | Paige Webb

 In her mind-bending debut Tussle, Paige Webb restages the old Western philosophical problem of the subject-object split as a wrestle between a quicksilver mind and erotic consciousness, which perceives the interpenetration of seeing and seen, of self and everything else. Ecologically astute and philosophically sharp, Webb’s cubistic poems remind of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Anne Carson. “Who doesn’t want to be,” Webb asks, looking at bees floating in a pool, “quietly wild, unshaven, drenched in collision?” Reader, drench yourself in this collision.  -Philip Metres     Chapter in which one character becomes her devices She carries the tea so carefully it spills, makes lists on lined paper, rubs salve on her lips. Each diagram she draws, from future to present, is endless distraction from regularity’s distraction. She could walk into a room where she wasn’t and not alter the air at all, not really. She could open a door to a new house and not alter her life, not completely