The Buffalo-based poet’s new collection launches tonight at BICA

Earlier this year Buffalo-based poet Rachelle Toarmino published a chapbook of experimental lyric poetry titled My Science. It was the winner of Sixth Finch Books’s 2024 Chapbook Prize, and published by Sixth Finch earlier this year.

In My Science, Toarmino limns out her most recent iteration of her ongoing practice of variations on 21st century lyric, the reclamation of lyric form that is equally informed by immersion in the 21st century vernacular and linguistic patterns shaped by the dominant technologies of our era and her deep reading of a wide swath of 20th century poetics—from conceptualist poetries and the language writing movement, to projective verse, confessional poetry (and the reactions to it)—and the entire valence of the lyric voice in the American poetry from the modernists to its 19th century progenitors Dickinson and Whitman.

The poems in My Science are experimental in the sense that they test the boundaries of what the speaker of a poem can say within the constraints of form while still retaining the affective valence of lyric. There is a self-reflexiveness to the formalism, a sense that like Schrödinger’s cat in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the “speaker of the poem” both is and is not the lyric “I” of the poems. In that simultaneity—that trace of presence and that detectable absence (in other words, that encoding of desire in language)—lies the focus of Toarmino’s practice and the project of her poetics.

The poems in My Science are re-titled as the second section titled “Flowers” in Toarmino’s second full-length collection of poems HELL YEAH, published this month by Third Man Books. The poems in the first section of the collection titled “Music” are poems she has written over the five years since the release of her first collection THAT EX (Big Lucks Books) in 2020. Several of the poems in this section were among the portfolio chosen for the American Academy Poets Poetry Prize at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where Toarmino received her Master of Fine Arts in Poetry in 2023. Part of the third and final section of poems titled “Meat” were published as the chapbook Comeback by Foundlings Press in 2021 as part of its Strays 4 bundled poetry issue series.

Taken as a whole, HELL YEAH is an emphatic assertion of lyric possibility against the deadening closure of commodification in the dominant culture, the degradation of a once common language, and the imposition of limits upon the sense of an uncontainable lyric self.

Like many of her peers writing 21st century lyric, Toarmino explores the limits of linguistic abstraction within the specificity of time and place, the constraints of form, and the intrinsic precarity of lyric poetry when the speaker of the poem or the form itself are stretched to the breaking point, grammatically or existentially.

Toarmino’s particular gift in this project is her concision. She writes in the first poem if the collection “Hell and Back”:

This is my body take it

Having made it so real

I broke it for you

In some ways this is poetics as an inversion of transubstantiation—not the divine word transformed into the body, but the real body broken to construct the lyric self. “Content is never more than an extension of form and form is never more than an extension of content,” the late Robert Creeley once wrote, and for Toarmino a broken body is a broken form.

Another one of Toarmino’s acknowledged influences is the late Alice Notley, who in “At Night the States” writes “At night the states/whistle. Anyone can live. I/ can. I am not doing any-/ thing doing this. I/ discover I love as I figure. Wed-/ nesday / I wanted to say something in / particular. I have been / where. I have seen it. The God/ can. The people/ do some more.’

In “Real Romantic,” a poem which is in many ways central to Toarmino’s poetics in this collection, you can almost hear Notley’s angel sending her prompts from the empyrean:

The impulse toward the lyric

is a private thing

and I’m a real insider

The sentence pulled back by its hair

settles into a miraculous

decoy for sense

Try telling a romantic

it’s not as real as it feels

I get hopeful

looking the part

So what if love is my form

Love is first of all

and the rest of it all also

I unnerve for you…

Perhaps in a more fully realized sense than any other younger poet I have ever met, Toarmino understands that the main work of poetics is building a community of practice, a community of shared poetics and active participation, an inclusive community of collaborative arts projects reaching across disciplinary boundaries, and a kind of generous solidarity based on poetics—not in the narrow careerist sense of poetics as a profession or personal brand, but in the fullest Aristotelian sense of poetics as a form of life.

Tonight (Friday, October 10th) as part of her book launch event for HELL YEAH at 7 p.m. at the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, 30D Essex Street in Buffalo, she will be joined by over a dozen of her closest friends and artistic collaborators, including Buffalo-based musician Little Cake (aka Ana Vafai), who will be debuting songs that borrow lyrics from Toarmino’s poetry, and eleven other participants in what she describes as a “Community Science Fair,” or a series of interactive art stations inspired by scientific theories, topics, and themes. Among the local writers and visual artists who will be participating in the exhibits are Aidan Ryan, Avye Alexandres, Dana Murray Tyrrell, Diego Espíritu, Gardner Astalos, Joel Brenden, Joshua Thermidor, Laura Marris, Noah Falck, Sarah Jane Barry, and Talia Ryan.

The event is free and open to the public. Copies HELL YEAH will be available for sale and signing. Two types of cake will be served for free.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Rachelle Toarmino is a poet from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collections Hell Yeah (Third Man Books, 2025) and That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020), as well as several chapbooks, most recently My Science (Sixth Finch Books, 2025), winner of the 2024 Sixth Finch Chapbook Contest. She is the founding editor-in-chief of the literary publishing project Peach Mag and the creator and lead instructor of Beauty School, an independent poetry school. She lives in Buffalo.