Review: 'The Archive Is All in Present Tense,' by Elizabeth Hoover

An archive is both a living and a dead thing; it is the record of a person's life, left behind after they die, but it also changes shape constantly as it is developed and leafed through by researchers. This sort of doubleness haunts Elizabeth Hoover's debut, "The Archive Is All in Present Tense," as if the author were constantly driven to show us the ways in which these planes collide as the book takes on the roots of selfhood as a research project.

The book comes to us in a mix of reproduced catalog cards, lists of search terms and dense verse and prose lines with narrative structures that are broken down as quickly as they are raised. You might find a list of search terms that concludes, "narrower term: kid with a fort on an empty beach / narrower term: woman without wishes for husband's return" followed by a poem in which the researcher presses her hands against her grandfather's wartime personal records, is chased out of the library, and then smells her hands deeply to absorb "oil, wrenches, gaskets, and valves."

Normally, such formal reaches would be distracting, but because of the expert control Hoover has over this project, the different modes of representation seem of a piece with each other; you conclude that these formal constructs are not tricks but corner pieces of a worldview.

If you wanted to pinpoint a narrative here, Hoover offers a relationship with a mysterious figure called the Archivist, on the one hand perhaps the Virgil to Hoover's Dante but on the other perhaps a stand-in for whatever force it is that may draw us back through our pasts in search of unity, of the answer to that old question that grows ever louder: Who am I, exactly?

Hoover seems certain of the answer; the smattered beautiful bursts of plainly stated biographical moments ("Once I fell / in love with a woman who'd been a thief"; "I've always wanted / a boyfriend like you language making it impossible / for her to love me back" interspersed with quotidiana writ surreal, like Max Ernst meets Umberto Eco meets Leonora Carrington (as when a librarian collapses "drunk / on the dust of wine" falling "out of time" or during a tour through a taxidermy exhibit, its displays rising out of the dark like so many totems) indicate, though, that the path to the answer is what she's after.

The path leads through thorny territory: lush, almost romantic and at times terrifying. The outlook seems at times hopeful and at times forbidding; Hoover communicates beautifully the sense of aloneness that comes with self-interrogation, the asking of tough questions about the struggle to be heard. Hoover gets at the simultaneous fearsomeness and high sensitivity of this search astutely near the end of the book, when she compacts near-erasure and durability into one inimitable sentence: "We are only the blanks of women and we carry these blanks inside us as the sky carries the white beneath a wing."

"The Archive Is All in Present Tense" is a high-wire walk over the ocean of memory.

Max Winter is a co-editor of the press Solid Objects and the author of "The Pictures" and "Walking Among Them."

The Archive is All in Present Tense

By: Elizabeth Hoover.

Publisher: Barrow Street, 82 pages, $18.