"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies, by Jennifer Nelson (Fence Books, 2025)
One January long ago, I served jury duty with a group of people who I spent every weekday with, but who I could not speak to in our holding room between court. When we were finally allowed to deliberate, I learned that one of us was an art historian and another a medieval scholar. Their perspectives reframed the whole trial, as if life today, all existence even, is one long continued reference to something taking place in a 15th- or 16th-century artwork. I remembered these unexpected tour guides while reading the books of Jennifer Nelson, leading me to see how Nelson transforms art scholarship into a worldview. After following Nelson’s growth over their first three poetry books, I didn’t know how their work might continue to deepen, particularly since the revelatory breakthroughs of Harm Eden, but their most recent book is endlessly surprising, pushing Nelson’s innovative poetic project even further.
The title poem of the book, “On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies,” is an incredible line that encapsulates everything I love about poetry, succinctly saying multiple things at once. Nelson posits creativity as an event in motion, a thing one does, the poet and the poem attending to (and tending to) art, in the act of foraging and forming. This line is so singly and carefully crafted in its direct acknowledgment that a work of art exists simultaneously in every history after its creation. A landscape painting will always be more than just a painting of a landscape. The forest and its horizon represent the way a thing was, or the possibility of a density beyond comprehension, the edge of understanding—or, to some, a place of exploration and conquest.
Placed toward the end of the book in a section revolving around the origin of life (“Primordial Tide Pool”), this poem is one big chunk with no stanza breaks, moving ceaselessly forward as though a metronome were tapping out the lines in philosophical beats. The poem opens with Nelson establishing the inadequacy of gender constructs, their function “as loss” and their failure to heal us from “the monster of time”:
… the tragedy game:
just be, just be, no pressure.
Let being and making
be the fullest
forms of grief.
The poet weighs the difference between having been made versus having made oneself according to one’s own desires. Choosing or conforming to one or the other is a kind of grief. It can feel impossible to be oneself in the midst of divisional systems.
Threaded through the poem is the tension between creating and being created. Guided by this conflict, Nelson journeys further into the title line, “On the way / to the paintings of forest robberies …” Whose forest? Whose land? Who is painting? Who is controlling the narrative? Is painting a forest a way of seizing it, robbing it? A way to observe its taking or a way of reclaiming it? Can one’s own intellect be colonized? The poet simply could have said they were on the way to see etchings and paintings of landscapes of the Dutch Golden Age, but the concise non-specific art tribute shifts the focus to the colonial presence within these landscape paintings.
Nelson’s poetic gait also takes us to natural elements occurring in urban environments, first raccoons, the cute urban beasts and incorrigible pests that are the direct beneficiary of human waste and consumption, and then to another possibly corrupted scene, a lake with “… algal bloom like rot / sputtering in anyone’s lungs.” Yet Nelson moves past these compromised points of view, finally arriving at the horizon, the reliable place that is always wherever you are, as far as the eye can see. The horizon earns our daily trust, as we all share for now the same air, and although the vastness of the horizon contains all that is comprehensible and incomprehensible, it is a consolation to look out into colors that are never quite the same. In a poem of heavy-hitting words (gender, grief, modernity, humility, genitals), Nelson ends with a simple comfort, the special treat of ice cream, lasting for its own scooped measure of time along with the poetic instruction to “Eat and shout.” What better way to combine two major influences of a culture, food and sex, the phrase flirtatiously nodding to the Beatles’ dancing, teen-screaming “Twist and Shout.” Nelson’s heady yet plainspoken eloquence gives us one part cunnilingus, one part taking in or digesting, and all parts enthusiasm and excitement. The poem captures its own portrait as a landscape of knowledge and pleasure.
Nelson distills poetry into a medium stripped of the unnecessary, free of bullshit, probing everything it sees, while pushing language to its most radical limit of compression. In a section of the book devoted to the present-day study of historical works of art, Nelson’s investigations challenge not only how artworks converse with time, but also what a poem can do as words engage with images. Tiny details recontextualize entire paintings, creating a path to discourse on what kind of meaning can be reclaimed from the past:
The world is dying,
and I would rather bathe in the disorganized
paint that clumps into discorded seeds,
not well mixed tougher, a dangerous
pornography, by which I mean a form
that destroys function.
Nelson’s interactions with art remind me of the 1970s dramas of Sidney Lumet, in which acting doesn’t feel like acting and crisis feels normal. Nelson’s poems build worlds out of art and treat analysis as an act of connection, which is in itself a kind of teaching, as the teacher holds hands with history.
In Nelson’s rendering, history becomes things made in space. The clearance of attachment, the physical distance one stands from a work of art (you have to move or museum guards will tell you to step back!), the divided audience of reader and looker, the space one needs to take it all in. From “Carpaccio’s Ten Thousand Soldiers Betrayed by Their Generals and Sent to Asia to Die”:
I’ve never been able to tell you what kind of distance I have
when I bring you into a painting
and how much it matters what you want and what I give,
what kind of warm twilight you want to inhabit,
and whether you’re next to me or with me at all.
This is the space-time continuum between creation and reception that Nelson addresses throughout the book: how an artwork stays the same but can be perceived differently over time. “You,” in these lines, could take on one of many forms—the reader or the intimate, the beloved or the friend, the painter or the painted, the student or the self. Across the present and the past, the poet wrestles with the delivery of their work, what to share and how to share it, while the reader is drawn into these intimate mysteries of creativity and witness.
How could anyone paint so clearly and so miserably all these dead bodies, the aloneness and togetherness of so many people dying all at once? By witnessing a plague, of course: “…since thirteen forty-eight no Venetian / had ever expelled the plague from their eyes.” This is true as well for the painter who survived the plague (having never expelled it from his eyes) and also for Nelson, who returns to this image within the re-contextualization of our modern plagues.
In the next poem, “Invocation: Jan Breughel’s Harbor Scene with Christ Preaching,” Nelson ventures into a painting created eighty years after the Carpaccio piece. The work is significantly darker, both in color and in theme, as even Jesus is hard to find, nearly impossible to pick out without the small halo around his head. What is striking about both the Carpaccio and the Breughel is how much they are both scenes densely populated with people, yet the first invokes death and the second life. Breughel paints Jesus in a busy harbor where a great crowd of people are coming and going, shopping at the market, working, watching, roaming. The water is filled with boats and the sky with birds and clouds, while an angel above it all looks so dragon-like that Nelson describes it as an “unangel.” (An example here of how Nelson plays with words the way painters paint.)
Counterbalancing the Where’s Waldo-like Jesus is a trail of fish, front and center, scattered around or in baskets. The association of Jesus with fish leads Nelson to begin and end the poem with them, first by reminding us that “big fish eat the small ones” and then by ending with an invocation to the fish themselves, which are “piled next to the empty shells / that always also mean pilgrim, profit, empire ….” Nelson is attuned to the idea that this object of trade is also a staple of parables, intermixing business, commodity, nourishment, and nature with the spiritual echoes of belief and faith. “How many people on the shore / want to be misled …,” Nelson asks. How many are willing to follow “a strong voice”? Does this constitute hope? Nelson asks the fish to “keep stinking of the sea,” to remind us of what they are, where they come from, and who brought them there.
Reading is the intimacy during which we curl up in someone’s mind, for a while knowing what they know and obsessing over their obsessions. (Martin Luther had friends and one of them was a painter! Who knew!) One of Nelson’s obsessions is clearly teaching, with an entire section of the book devoted to its mental landscape. It is a tribute simultaneously reverent and ironic. “I keep the toes // I’ve lost in a perpetual stew / simmering since the 1520s.” In the book’s first section, “Tenure Dossier,” Nelson brings to light staid academic protocols through poem titles such as “Condition for Retention,” “CV,” and “Statement of Future Research Plans,” and these poems are fists of intellectual prowess, punching through academic rigmarole toward a kind of renegade freedom, offering a truly human take on what a CV should be: “I have never / stopped asking / to be good. Waking / shows the gulf / inside the asking.” The poems transmute the academy into a site of potential liberation, a place that can be molded and changed, even if the professors themselves feel stuck. “If I were emperor!” This is an exemplary declaration of the power of the mind: the poet declares that if they were in charge, empires and colonial undertakings would be held accountable. If “I” were the anti-emperor!
This section on academia really weighs and measures personal usefulness and the utility of a career in nourishing knowledge. Nelson even questions their own name, Jennifer, a name of youth and femininity, a name of a thousand nicknames, a name ubiquitous and daring, three syllables evoking a possible way of being. Where in a CV or dossier do you get to express your worth as a person, a friend, a family member, a scholar? Where in the regimented process of tenure do you show the institution your path to enlightenment, not only your value to the bottom line? “Where is this realm beyond use? I said. // I don’t know, I said. I dream like moss at night.” Moss takes a long time to grow, as does an unabashed confidence in art history and the empowerment to fight for one’s worth. Nelson writes:
As I woke up I was wondering whether
I could appeal for a second review.
I am a scholar through and through.
I can’t think of confidence and presentation without thinking about the role of ghosts in Nelson’s work. Ghosts circle through these poems so much that I kept thinking to myself, yes, finally someone sees the afterlife the way I do! Ghosts, especially in this opening section of the book, are the embodiment (and non-embodiment) of usefulness, of worthiness. “I know I am a ghost to you, / suspended between books.” The person who reads and writes poetry is invisible yet not invisible, hovering over details. Is a person remembered because they were useful, the way a ghost is useful? A presence that doesn’t want to miss anything.
One of the best poems in the book, “Writing Sample: The Boxer Codex,” feels haunted by the ghostly figures hidden within scholarship: “… what would I do otherwise? If I / led the expedition, should I not / abolish expeditions ….” Formally the poem moves from dense, essayistic descriptions to single lines on a page to tight, traditional-looking stanzas. The lines themselves don’t break with a snap, with phrase fragments carrying vested thoughts and histories as Nelson grapples with how the European colonizers looked at their “discoveries,” seeing in other cultures “the need for governance // and conquista.” Nelson reclaims this narrative on behalf of its ghosts, its artifacts, its native peoples trading their wares for iron.
“Are you still in this open-sea market, are you biting the iron hook?” Nelson asks, and in this question so many of the book’s themes converge: the multiplicities of “you” (the poet, the reader, the artist, the viewer, the native, the trader, the ghost, the conqueror, the conquered), everyone out there on the open sea, once a gateway to unknown places and peoples, but now a “market” (the job market, the art market), taking the bait before getting caught, biting the hook. But are you still biting that hook? Are you still taking the bait? “During this exchange the cannons / of the galleon stay quiet …”
Nelson has an uncanny way of identifying moments in which history finds itself on the brink of transformation or collapse and yet through art these moments remain present, allowing their meanings to reemerge:
… and into woodcuts from the Ming
so the unknown artist of the Boxer Codex
could rework that old insight into water
as a gradient twisting through itself
more than three hundred years later.
What bookends these time-bending processes is language. It is language that comes before and after the act of art-making, both the inspiration and the reception. All art is described, defined, framed, hanged, shelved, restored, and revisited. Nelson points out that birds “can live thirty years in a cage / and forever in mosaic ….” Nelson’s poetry places words where artists did not and in tandem with history creates a new vision that looks backward and forward, a way of studying the past to see what’s ahead.