“A certain unpleasant episode has taken dominion of my life,” declares the Providence writer Kate Colby in her new essay collection, “but I’m leaving it to a few light references in my life on paper.” Over the course of a year beset with difficulties, Colby wrote an essay a day, and the result is Paradoxx, a philosophically teasing volume in which Colby copes with her problem by writing over, under, and around it. “I don’t want this memory,” she writes, “so I’m laundering it.”
At once homespun and criminal, laundry as a metaphor for Colby’s writing process is also completely on point. The world of Paradoxx is that of a mother at the end of her rope, stuck at home with her two children and obsessed with social misdemeanors like virtue signaling and wish-cycling. The volume features meditations on cheap plastic toys and expensive beauty products, late-night deep dives into the history of film that lead to the Facebook-mediated lives of school friends.
She also reads a lot. Passages about her reading—mainly of American poets like Muriel Rukeyser and Wallace Stevens—give way to reflections on what she finds on the internet by clicking aimlessly around. Several paragraphs begin, “There is a recent rash of writing” about some topic or person, and the metaphor, of a rash, conveys another important aspect of Colby’s approach: she observes the culture as with a mother’s wary eye, noting outbreaks of inflammation and running a cool hand over them.
Colby’s overriding concern is whether it is possible to be a good person in a trashed world. The detritus of childhood is a particular problem. Her children seem to be magnets for the stuff: “spider rings, adhesive jewels, Groucho glasses.” She confesses, “I don’t know what to do with their ravaged board books and dented plastic play food.” She reflects poignantly on one of her son’s toys, a “play toolset” made of plastic. The tools have been lost, dispersed, as kids’ toys sometimes are, but the toy’s case remains, hanging around the house like an unwelcome guest. “It can’t be recycled. It makes me unhappy every time I see it.”
As the title suggests, Colby excels at talking herself into corners, arriving at conclusions that are also confessions, moments of telling on—doxxing—herself. She’s particularly incisive about the middle-class hypocrisy of doing good deeds in order to avoid taking responsibility for something. “I have a habit of donating junk only so I don’t have to toss it myself,” she confesses. But “what sort of being” is undone, as she is, by “a useless box of lost fake tools?”
A poet who teaches at Brown, Colby has published steadily since 2006, producing nine full-length poetry collections and five chapbooks. Paradoxx is her first foray into prose. As in her poetry, wordplay abounds. Fittingly, just when she talks about wordplay, she introduces one of her beloved paradoxes while also, at the same time, telling on herself. “I have a weakness and a knack for clever wordplay,” she says, and then follows this observation with a confession: “I’m not sure they are different.”
Colby’s sprawling sentences link times and topics, memories and insights. “I am always cold, so perfectly unfit for winter sports,” she writes, “but skiing was one of several skills I’m unsuited for that my parents required I be proficient in.” The back half of the sentence asserts a causal relationship, while the disjunctive “but” propels the reader forward as Colby widens the temporal frame to show the causal relationship in a different way, through the lenses of family and memory. As soon as I found my way to the end of one of these exhilarating sentences, I began hunting for the next.
Providence appears in glimpses. She mentions the “historic university” in her neighborhood, “at the edge of which I live and only provisionally teach.” The Providence Athenaeum, which she describes as “an antique private library” that hosts events “for would-be Renaissance people among its literary bric-a-brac,” also provides her with needed refuge from her domestic chaos. Perhaps most appealing are her observations of the use of “civic purple” in the streetscape of downtown. In the self-revealing spirit of the book, I’ll tell on myself here: Until I read Colby’s note about the pattern, I’d never noticed it. Now I’m looking forward to better weather, so I can see the city’s distinctive color for myself.
Diane Josefowicz is the author, most recently, of Guardians & Saints: Stories, published in October by Cornerstone Press. Her second novel, The Great Houses of Pill Hill, will be published by Soho Press in May. Learn more at: www.dianejosefowicz.com
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