Sweet: Nicolette Polek’s Imaginary Museums – Manuel Marrero
August 5, 2024
There are two types of literature, digressive and technological. Imaginary Museums ensconces itself in the latter. Nicolette Polek moves spatially through a story. Like auras. Like pop songs. “She’s that summer’s Darling, the sweetest kiss.” Two sentences later everything’s changed. The rigorous density in brevity answers the call to short form with heft. “She smells of leather and something sweet, and feels crushing and unforgiving when she sits on Laszlo’s lap.” There’s a fractal ubiquity to the style, but the heart grows fonder with emotional distance, only your heart isn’t big enough, creating a haunting vacancy that is pure presence. It’s privately intimate, even insular, and lyrical. Some stories feel like music, others are structured like prayers. She sweeps epic ideas and powerful emotions in sphinx-like executions of ruthless logic and texture. The dialectic is prismatic and opaque. That’s not a paradox, it’s a feature. Thought experiments are perilous. There are consequences to sidestepping spiritual life and Polek wants you to know. Like installations or fixtures, you can wander. Writers would prioritize propulsion or conflict/forward momentum in lieu of humbling inertia. Rather than dwell in the contours of sagacity watching the time pass and the clock-hands move in their “sweet soul pain,” they’d sooner jerk you around. This is a function of scarcity but Polek works from abundance. I like parables because they make you work, which to me is more elemental in storytelling than passivity to blunt force. They are not tendentious but interrogative. I appreciate the book’s faithful willingness to let me think about anything else while reading it. It is not so much stark emotional literacy as it is awed primal upheaval of fanciful invention to show how the material world lives from a distinctly monastic perspective. The stories are repurposed for a book, having been mostly previously published on websites and marquee boards. One story was used as a press release for a solo show at an art venue in Baltimore. One of my favorite pieces, “The Nearby Place,” was included in a group exhibition. In three pages, it demonstrates what works about the collection. It’s a distillation of hope from some memory care hospice, the speaker at the mercy of another’s compassion. Imaginary Museums is a toy chest assembled into four near equal portions of solipsistic quintessence. The kind of beguiling idleness that must attend the practice of faith, wrapped in lean poetic muscle drawing blood from a clenched fist. It seems to have no age but was published in book form in 2020. It possesses striking interiority for mostly third person, which incidentally is a lot like how the world feels to me.