Kathleen Ossip's chapbook Cinephrastics (horse less press, 2006) is an ironic, intimate meditation on observation. Focusing on our collective American participation in the specific art and industry of film, her twenty-four poems—a tidy nine or ten lines each—throw a sly, fresh, and most of all gentle blow at the common notion that those who critique art  do so because they can't create it.  

She knows all too well that literary and artistic criticism has by now become its own art form.  Taking this a step further, Ossip writes one poem per film and leaves it to us to draw (or not) the lines between experience and analysis, originality and redundancy, and —that conflict so built in to, so fundamentally of Film Studies—between high art and low art.

Ossip, loyal to critical analysis, has buried her own subjective opinions and recast her ideas into the language of efficacy.  She refuses to tell you what she likes or why, and instead builds her arguments subtly around what is or is not effective.  Check your film studies syllabi, she's an exemplary student. 

She refuses to be jaded, though, by the complaints many have about deconstruction's ability to suck meaning and enjoyment from the experiencing of life and art.  Her genuine affection for cinema is impossible to ignore.  In the poem Finding Nemo this is especially apparent, and is possibly the first instance of it wriggling and shining through.  However intensely she has left herself out of her own observations, her fondness for movies can't be covered up in this pile of sulky, thunderstruck indignation, regardless of how earnestly she feels both. Amidst all the secondary reflection and the academic meta-awareness, it's still the voice of an individual that projects onto each line.  

Just as her poems reveal themselves more as a critique of the reception of films instead of the films themselves, so too do they become an articulation of her own concerns about this articulation.  She wants us to live sincerely and she wants us to make fresh art.  She is entirely aware of this conflict.  What is the relationship between artifice and reality? What should it be? And what does that mean? For artifice and reality?  For us and for her?  

"Skank me not, regard me not," sure, these are a given.  But she doesn't want to end up "bare on Said-so Row" either.  To avoid it, she's brought to the table a technical aptitude and talent for interpersonal communication, along with her own "damn mick sentimentality."  I appreciated her thoughtful selection and nimble accomplishment of these objectives. And I liked Cinephrastics a whole, whole lot.


                                                         --Jessica Millnitz