Reviewed by Alice Maglio

As I made my way through Kate Colby's latest book, Dream of the Trenches, I found myself rather frenetically typing up pages of notes. About a third of the way in, I decided I needed a color coding system that would allow me to track the concepts and objects moving in swift trajectories through the work (the eyelid, Ben Lerner, words without antonyms, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ouroboros, doubt, to name just a few). The slim volume is exhausting, but that's the point. This is a book about the process of writing, thinking about the self, and thinking about the self in relation to writing. It's also a book about movement. It shape-shifts, taking on the guise of a sly Matryoshka doll, aware of its own nesting tendencies, all the while aware that you are aware of them. 

As abstract concepts fight for space on each page, Colby roots us in the physical. "Driving to Margaret's Mother's Memorial Service"—this heading sits atop most of the reflective, prose poem-esque fragments that make up the book. Colby, or a Colby-like character, wends her way through the rainy coastal towns of Massachusetts trying to get to the funeral of her friend's mother—a woman she barely knows. This is a seemingly random action, but that hardly matters. What does matter is that the narrator is moving and also that the narrative has a container as it delves into its discussion of the writing process. 

Shapes and containers are so important in this book, but they can also be limiting. The narrator tells us that she has a list (a container) taped to her bathroom mirror reminding her of:

Things to Stop Using in My Poems: mirrors (halls of mirrors, two- or three-way, etc.) / self-self-reflexivity / mise en abyme / combinations / recursion / involution / Ouroboros / recapitulation (ontogeny, phylogeny, etc.) / anything suggested by Hofstadter* / *modulating musical canons / millefeuille / matryoshka / loops (feedback, strange, etc.) / sets within themselves.    

And yet the book talks about and enacts most of these forms in the ensuing pages. They seem inevitable. Colby is obsessed with the forms and interested in their utility in conveying truth of experience. She wants to write after Ben Lerner, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, noting, "What they might have in common that makes me feel flat by comparison is their ability to convey qualities of real time in words." So Colby's book is fighting against this feeling of flatness—consistently building itself up and out, doubling and redoubling, trying to create a whole. 

Is it possible to fully succeed in this endeavor—within this work or within any work? Probably not. Colby points out that even Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station, a book she has deep admiration for and references throughout Dream of the Trenches, has a hole. It doesn't give sufficient explanation for why the protagonist never suffers consequences for using his parents' credit card. Colby surmises that maybe Lerner didn't leave this gap intentionally but rather got tired—he just didn't have it in him to explain this one last thing, and she says, "A laid abyss is lazy. An abyss born of exhaustion is the truest thing there is." 

Moments like these, ones that cut with both perception and humor, are what make me love the voice in this book. And the voice really is what keeps me reading and tolerating my own note-taking process. When we as writers and readers dig ourselves into the trench of meta-analysis or toss ourselves into the abyss of reflection, Colby suggests that it's possible to take ourselves too seriously. To get too buried and divorced from what is, perhaps, true intention and expression. We need some lightness. Conceptual writing can be downright boring and it is, "always swallowing and unbirthing itself, its opposites and the arguments against it like a figuratively fucking autogamous water snake." There's something so joyful and permission-giving in this statement.  

And Dream of the Trenches keeps analyzing itself and its success, the narrator's exhaustion and doubt moving through this process—keeps going inward, layering thought upon thought, linguistic analysis upon linguistic analysis, exhausting itself. But it also keeps pushing out, keeps re-grounding itself and the narrator in the physical world. Motherhood emerges as a significant anchoring point, and Colby notes, "After the unspeakable horror of seeing my kid get shoved on the playground, I know I no longer live inside my eye holes." This seems to be yet another challenge to interiority. The body is a container, and birth is the ultimate push toward exteriority, a new entity that has the potential to give the author/body meaning. 

And so, by the end, Colby leaves us with the impression that the writing and thinking about writing processes are exhausting, engaging, boring, funny, inevitable. What seems to matter most, as writers, is the fact of showing up to the abyss of the page: "There's no way out but through."