Test Pattern a Fantod of Prose Poems by Carol Willette Bachofner

In this new collection, Carol Bachofner forges a neoteric vision of poetry with her tongs and hammer. She calls Test Pattern a “fantod” of poems, based on a sense of  “uneasiness or unreasonableness” caused by the unfamiliarity of newness, of breaking apart to create something original. To tread the grounds of fantod, the reader must get sweaty and work those muscles. These poems are big, though they are not long poems. They are meant to stir up the status quo, even to cause trouble.

The prose sonnets are sometimes structured through a numbering system, much like dictionary definitions, which layers and accumulates meaning. Contemporary and vintage images blend uneasily, but cannily, on a borderland between poetry and prose, between a gritty present moment and a disquieting magic realism. In the title poem, “Test Pattern,” (the nightly sign-off of early television), the reader is encouraged to see “sleep time mandated by the National Broadcasting Company and the American Broadcasting Company, those controlling bastards.” We are born into patterns, like sonnets, which predate us, but it is up to us to break out from that domination. These are not your Grandma’s sonnets. These are sonnets for the future.

–Luanne Castle, author Kin Types