A Review of Jeff Russell’s By The Time This Reaches You by Jasper Adams-Smith
A Review of Jeff Russell’s By The Time This Reaches You by Jasper Adams-Smith
Rarely does the placement of a foreword or afterword itself become a stylistic or thematic element of a book, but Jeff Russell’s By The Time This Reaches You, new this year from Selva Obscura Press, is the exception to this rule. The cover offers little guidance to readers beyond its lovely abstract artwork; a table of contents sets up the device of colored fonts separating each piece’s three segments (short, poetic epigraphs precede each of the two extended poems); and, while the afterword reveals the book's influences, the book's format overall encourages exploration without preconception.
This approach works in favor of the surreal, evocative text that follows. As the three sections intermingle with each other, flitting from place to place across the page, so too does the subject and the dialect. Ornate, almost archaic turns of phrase work hand-in-hand with modern textual slang and words accented as speech: “at the simple gesture of shallow joke-light/scraped ’gainst the desert sky/lol.”
Other reviews have speculated on the nature of the three voices speaking: “Lovers? Children? The dead?” In particular, Joseph Donahue speculates, “California surfers waiting for the wade they will ride out into intergalactic space?” To me, though, what the voices evoked was a chattering chorus: at times synchronizing, echoing each other, dancing with each other, culminating in solos as interesting independently as the sum of their parts. Together, they travel through birth, death, love, the desert, the senses, the past and future, and more, observers and participants inviting the reader to drift with them wherever that journey may end.
This is Russell’s debut publication of poetry, though selections from this work have been published multiple times in various literary journals (including Miracle Monocle itself, as a winner of the Fall 2020 Award for Innovative Writing). Additionally, Russell has contributed to the publication of multiple literary works, including books of poetry, as an advisor for independent publisher Jackleg Press. Despite that, in the afterword, Russell expresses doubt about whether the format of a book does justice to his initial vision for the work. The original intended format, apparently, was as a 120-foot-long, 2-foot-wide vertical scroll, reflecting the poems’ influences from classical Chinese poetry and Russell’s attempts to translate Wang Wei’s eighth century poem “Deer Park” into English.
A slightly over 100-page book is certainly a bit more accessible than a slightly over 100-foot scroll, but beyond that, the book’s challenges to conventional formatting themselves convey further meaning. As mentioned above, each poem’s three parts are delineated by red, blue, or green text, echoing, challenging, and weaving into each other throughout the full poems. The text jumps and wanders throughout the page, at times shrinking back toward the fold or straining against the very limits of the margins, against the page itself. These traits directly challenge the format of the book, the near-universal image of the English language, and even then, the translation from scroll to book affected its very shape: 10-inches by 12-inches, the bane of the fastidious bookshelf organizer. Russell’s intent to push the limits of the form of English itself shows through in this execution, arguably even moreso than had the piece been published in a format more experimental in its own right.
This is an unconventional work, one that won’t appeal to every reader, and I say that as a form of praise. The most memorable works of any genre, especially ones as highly personal and often experimental as poetry, reflect the personal passions and singular lived experiences of an individual. By The Time This Reaches You falls squarely into that category, the product of one writer’s fascination with a linguistic subject and the translation of that subject into poetry. If that description or anything above sounds appealing, then you’ll likely find this book a hidden gem.
By The Time This Reaches You is available from Amazon or from Asterism Books. An audiobook version is also availablehere.