Review: A Sleepless Man Sits Up in Bed

A Sleepless Man Sits Up in Bed by Anthony Seidman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Anthony Seidman’s third collection of poetry, A Sleepless Man Sits Up In Bed, unveils a liminal space parsimoniously claimed by many as a border and invites the reader not only to cross over, but to perforate the concept itself. This collection builds around objects that are seemingly mundane, like an “Uncapped Pen,” until it reaches profundity. Seidman takes something explicit and sublunary – “Coatlicue, Whose Name Means ‘Serpent Skirt’” – and sends the reader on a journey through the ancient and the modern, the past and future, the present and the nostalgic; ages, visions, and states converge in an ornate poetic wandering, submerging the reader into the ebb and flow of continuity and transformation.

Seidman’s liminal space awakened a memory of my days at the university, when I studied border cultures – specifically, the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, with its focus on the (im)possibilities of borderlands, a geographical area sensitive to hybridity. However, Seidman manifests a different approach to dialoguing about the possible domain of the borderland and proves that poetry is a veritable and noble way of engaging the linguistic hybridity, creating a completely autonomous dialogue that can flow independently. This book is a sustainment, or maybe a suspension, of this liminal area, held by a long thread stitched with poems that share rhythm and structure, with repetitions of certain words establishing a thematic backbone. Examples include the black dog, which appears multiple times in the collection – in one instance, as the soul of the poet in “2300 BC Emperor Yao” – and fronds, which recur in descriptions of a goddess’s brow and in those of a verdurous jungle.

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