{"id":17631,"date":"2025-04-25T14:07:08","date_gmt":"2025-04-25T13:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=17631"},"modified":"2025-04-25T14:07:08","modified_gmt":"2025-04-25T13:07:08","slug":"review-the-occupant-by-jennifer-maier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2025\/04\/25\/review-the-occupant-by-jennifer-maier\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Occupant by Jennifer Maier"},"content":{"rendered":"

How would you feel upon discovering the objects of your daily, habitual use\u2014ordinary objects of every imaginable function and variety\u2014were inspirited, sensitively keen observers with their own desires, gripes, preoccupations, and ways of understanding the world?<\/span><\/p>\n

This is precisely the brain-tickling puzzle Jennifer Maier\u2019s newly-released third collection The Occupant <\/em>(University of Pittsburgh Press)<\/a><\/span> shakes, opens, and pieces together with feeling and skill. A deft mingling of prose and traditional poems offer pathos, wit, and vulnerable, costly wisdom as 30-odd objects speak from the vantage point of their respective individual existences alongside the titular \u201coccupant,\u201d \u2013 an unnamed woman living alone to whom they belong; and whose point of view is also poetically inhabited.<\/p>\n

Maier is at her best in these moving poems, which deliberately rely on the rhythms of one person\u2019s quotidian existence and \u2018stuff\u2019 to raise urgent, profound questions about human life and experience. Take, for instance, the goosebump-inducing rebuke of \u201cAlarm Clock\u201d \u2013<\/p>\n

–<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 How like you not to see<\/em><\/p>\n

that even I, untouched by time, can\u2019t keep it.<\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 –<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Some days I want to drop my hands<\/em><\/p>\n

in futility at the way you equate passing with<\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 –<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 dissolution: each tick a small erasure,<\/em><\/p>\n

like the beat of your own heart: one less,
\n–<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 one less. And have you ever stopped to think<\/em>
\nnot even you can spend a thing you can\u2019t possess?<\/em><\/p>\n

The wonderful tonal panoply of this collection\u2014which moves with the poet\u2019s characteristically fluid grace through everything from wry humor (Think opposites attract?\/\/Ix-nay<\/em> on that) to loneliness (The woman wonders if she has taken up knitting because she has no children) to existential angst\u2014is enabled by the dynamic marriage of Maier\u2019s own prolific emotive range with the metaphysical conceit at play throughout The Occupant<\/em>; which includes in its opening pages Paul \u00c9luard\u2019s words\u2014\u201cThere is another world, but it is in this one\u201d \u2013a marvelous and discreet key unlocking the pages that follow.<\/p>\n

In penning this review, I found I couldn\u2019t waste my privileged position as Jennifer Maier\u2019s MFA student-advisee. She was good enough to tell me (following the careful consideration with which she approaches even the smallest endeavor) what inanimate object she would herself elect to become for eternity. (I told her I\u2019d be a gargoyle, which is accurate, if mildly out-of-pocket) She went with a rather more elegant selection\u2014<\/p>\n

\u2018As ever, I would be torn between beauty (my French Empire walnut bookcase) and utility (a whisk, or a pair of scissors).\u00a0\u00a0But if I had to be a single object for eternity, I think I would be a mirror \u2013 a beautiful one, to be sure.\u00a0\u00a0As a mirror, I could encounter a wide variety of faces and objects and reflect them back, neutrally, without preconceptions. And I would certainly enjoy observing the private\u00a0responses—satisfaction, dismay–of those searching my reaches for “what they really are,” or believe themselves to be.\u2019<\/p>\n

Because of the immense and obvious thematic consistency, I wondered if Jennifer had encountered a recent, fascinating-if-head-scratching development in philosophy. I shot her an email:<\/p>\n

Are you familiar with the (quite new!!) trend in metaphysics called Object-oriented Ontology?? There\u2019s SO much natural overlap with your book that I think I\u2019ll have to highlight the connection.<\/em><\/p>\n

In brief:<\/em><\/p>\n

Object-oriented ontology\u00a0maintains that objects exist independently\u00a0of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects.\u00a0For object-oriented ontologists, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal ontological footing with one another.<\/em><\/p>\n

She replied\u2014<\/p>\n

I was not aware\u00a0per se\u00a0of Object-oriented Ontology, but the objects in my home \u2013 or in the Occupant’s, for that matter \u2013 may well be “ontologically exhausted,\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

especially today, when I’m trying to get everything back in order after last week’s renovations and painting (I decided to do the same color in the living room\u2014Farrow & Ball\u2019s \u201cElephant’s Breath,\u201d partly for the name, and partly because I love how it <\/em>slouches\u00a0between gray and lavender, depending on light and time of day)<\/em><\/p>\n

Ontological exhaustion is no joke\u2014person or saucer or spider\u2014and the remedies seem few and far between. Even so, The Occupant\u2019s <\/em>occupant appears to find a strange, imprecise respite in Maier\u2019s closing poem; in the character of the light, which may be instructive for us all:<\/p>\n

–<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Time is flowing forward again; sunlight gilding<\/em>
\nthis still room in the house of the mind that deplores a vacancy as, then and<\/em>
\nnow, the Occupant looks up from her writing to trace particles of dust drifting<\/em>
\neverywhere in the air, alighting on every surface.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jennifer Maier’s work has appeared in Poetry, American Poet, The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, The Writer’s Almanac, and in many other print, online, and media venues. Her debut collection, Dark Alphabet, was named one of \u201cTen Remarkable Books of 2006\u201d by the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the 2008 Poets’ Prize. Her second book, Now, Now, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2013. She serves as writer in residence and professor of modern poetry and creative writing at Seattle Pacific Universit<\/em><\/p>\n

Feature Image: Daniele Idini<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How would you feel upon discovering the objects of your daily, habitual use\u2014ordinary objects of every imaginable function and variety\u2014were inspirited, sensitively keen observers with their own desires, gripes, preoccupations, and ways of understanding the world? This is precisely the brain-tickling puzzle Jennifer Maier\u2019s newly-released third collection The Occupant (University of Pittsburgh Press) shakes, opens, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":17632,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,19],"tags":[1368,1450,1454,2104,3392,3947,3950,3953,4830,4831,5779,6767,7807,8500,8922],"class_list":["post-17631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-society-culture","tag-cassandra-voices-culture","tag-cassandra-voices-poetry-review","tag-cassandra-voices-review","tag-culture","tag-food","tag-haley-hodges-jennifer-maier","tag-haley-hodges-poet","tag-haley-hodges-reviews","tag-jennifer","tag-jennifer-maier-the-occupant","tag-maier","tag-occupant","tag-review","tag-society","tag-the"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}