To See Beyond What Is: A Review of Patrick Kindig’s fascinations by Ariana Alvarado

What does it mean to see and to be seen? That is the core question of Partick Kindig’s fascinations, his newest collection of poems from Finishing Line Press. Kindig is the author of several other collections, including his chapbook, all the catholic gods (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019) and micro-chapbook Dry Spell (Porkbelly Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, the Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, and the Washington Square Review, among others. You can also find his poems in Issue 22 of Miracle Monocle.

Aptly titled, fascinations is an inquiry into the most basic levels of human (and nonhuman) interaction: the power of the eye, what it means to gaze upon something, to truly see it, or to make it something beyond what it ever has been.

Reading the collection feels like venturing into a dream world, a land inhabited by authorial obsessions and open-ended questions alike, searching for answers that you can only just graze with your fingertips. fascinations leans into the narrative possibility of the abstract, questioning not only what it means to see, but what it means to be, as the first poem of the collection, “candlelight,” opens with the provocative lines:

it blinks to the eye

a king of code, the lid

wax, the iris

an iris: a lesson

for the eye in how

to be itself. think,

In these opening lines, Kindig already sets up the reader’s journey throughout the collection: to see the encoded meanings for more than what they are, to question the power of the eye that sees and thus exists as itself. Opening to this variety of narrative interpretations, the poem ends on this note:

the light says: you

could be a dandelion

in reverse. think,

spit says: everything

could be.

Kindig’s commitment to abstraction makes this poem’s claim true: everything can be, in this world of seeing and being seen, wherein both the reader and the objects of the poems are only defined by their ability to wonder and redefine their gaze.

This is not to say that fascinations wades so deep into the abstract as not to have any coherent narrative. Rather, Kindig intersperses his interrogation of sight with prose poems that tell stories of sexuality, and the formation–or deformation–of the self. While many of his poems in the collection play with white space and caesura, weaving the reader through open paths of interpretation, the prose poems “blue,” “miss g—,” and “t—” are tight knit and claustrophobic, featuring long, drawn out sentences devoid of punctuation. This fosters a sense of anxiety in the reader as they follow the troubled stories of these mostly unnamed recurring characters.

These prose poems, and the recurring theme of the eye, act as an anchoring point in a collection that otherwise draws its reader into a world of existential reflection. “blue” tells the story of a woman who loses her former sense of identity after being assaulted, becoming the “blue haired woman” that is referenced throughout the collection, but Kindig keeps this particular narrative connected to the main theme of the collection, showing us: "why she could not look at / herself why nobody else could look at her”

Every word in this collection was chosen with a painstaking particularity. Though fascinations is a fast read, each poem is constructed to make the most impact with the fewest amount of words. Each word serves a dedicated purpose that makes the collection read sparse of vocabulary yet rich with metaphor, personification, and varied meaning to the right reader who will take the time to parse through the open-ended interpretative paths.

Simply put, fascinations is not a collection that seeks to be understood, but rather experienced. Rather than give answers, it poses questions; rather than define, it complicates. I would not hesitate to recommend it to any poet or reader looking to flex their imaginative muscles and sink into the deep world of imagery and vision. Hopefully, they come out with new eyes to see.