The second line of the first poem (The Mist Lifts) indulges in the words ‘higgeldy-piggeldy.’

That’s an expression of whimsy, but a special kind of whimsy.

A sing-song mood of dark, Dickensian whimsy (think of the lingering descriptions of the yellow fog from the opening passages of Bleak House).

Even though the poems make frequent use of surrealistic association games, their influence is kept low key and does not interfere with the anachronistic avalanche of faint and constant archaicisms (see what I did there? that’s called ‘alliteration’).

The book is divided into three parts and part I and II are by far the best, because they make use of a sonnet-like form. While not rhymed (at least, not in any traditional sense), they have a musicality and the use of a thirteen line and then and eight line stanza clearly references the sonnet.

The middle section consists of longer poems, each longer than a page and most running on for three pages or more. They are broken up into stanzas, but the music is diminished by the lack of order the sonnet-esque form imposed.

But the stuff that works… really works. I saw last year’s winner, too, and was singularly unimpressed. Not so this year. Andrews is someone whose second collection I would buy, no question, just to see what he does next.

The third section of TOUT VA BIEN is also called TOUT VA BIEN.

To be quite frank, it’s less interesting than the first two sections. It opens with some prose (I wouldn’t call them prose poems, just prose) and then movies onto some conceptual poetry about conceptual poetry. Which I don’t object to in general, but everything rather reads like a lesser version of Vanessa Place’s much talked about little blue book, Notes on Conceptualisms.

The writing is good, but if I’m honest, reading this section didn’t make me want to read more Stein, it made me want to go back and re-read Notes on Conceptualisms.

I’m going to try to do a close reading of Suzanne Stein’s . I can’t remember where I got this – I think it came with something I ordered (TOUT VA BIEN has only been given away, rather than sold).

It’s divided into several sections, the first of which is HOLE IN SPACE.

HOLE IN SPACE is the transcript of Suzanne Stein speaking extemporaneously at St Mark’s Poetry Project in 2008. ‘Hole’ is apt, because a significant portion of the text are ellipses and ‘um’ or ‘uhhh’ – each of those being a ‘hole’ in speech. On the other side of things, it’s hard to see much else. I just read it and I can barely remember what it was about (which is primarily a discussion of space and place – how the internet has changed the sense of place, what site-specific work would/should look like in the current environment; which presents a contrast to the title, which translated means, ‘it’s going well;’ while that’s just a colloquial phrase for ‘things are okay,’ looking closely, it does use ‘va’ or ‘goes;’ motion in the title, but the first section is about not about ‘going’ or motion, but about mindfulness of place).

The effect is very similar to some of the works of Kenneth Goldsmith. Like his complete transcription of single issue of the New York Times or his transcription of a year’s worth of traffic reports or his transcription of a year’s worth of weather reports, HOLE IN SPACE encourages a center mindfulness, if one is willing to enter an empty, meditative state. However, that effect is not to make one aware of ostensible meaning. Reading Goldsmith’s transcription does not give one greater understanding of the meaning of that day’s New York Times, but rather of words and repetitions without meaning. Free from connection to literal meaning, it takes lectio divina another level. Which is why I struggled to remember the meaning of the talk she was giving, but remember very clearly the holes in the transcribed language. Looking for meaning between the words and sentences of language rather than within the words and sentences in language.