"In her new book of poems, Jalousie, Allyson Paty athletically crashes the present moment back through the diagonals of history. Through luminous perceptual collaging, the sounds in her dreams, her dailiness, and the wrath of the gods combine in a poetic logic that is both irrefutable and moving."

"The title of this stunning collection refers to a window treatment which has rows of angled slats, like blinds or shutters, and Allyson Paty’s disarming lyric exemplifies a deliciously sharp perspective which at times ranges from being seen literally through partially-opened slats, the world at a slant, to confronting the mediations of how we tender our communications, representations of self, labor, and love. These are poems reminiscent of the cutting lines of Elaine Kahn and Elisa Gabbert, but these poems are uniquely their own.

Here, where “vision began / and ended was medias res,” Jalousie may feel like mid-stream meditations but are in fact wholistic wrestlings with what it means to live and work in today’s metropolis: subjects tackled are: technology (phones, computers), capitalism, being an object of the state, but also the leisure of “watching Blow Up” on the sofa with “Krasdale Puffed Rice with Real Cocoa” in hand. At its core, these poems explore “the condition of place / inside a body,” the body within an urban place, and also the body cognizant of contextual history.

The speaker of the poem “In Medias Res,” knows to “shut [their] eyes / to receive,” which is to say, to listen to one’s surroundings in order to catch details the eye often misses. Allyson Paty understands that “to see / is to have at a distance // what populates vision” and the “distance” in their case is a view filtered as if through shutters–hidden, protected, but because there is “not quite so much sun,” is able to receive much more of scene. And by the final line in this fine collection, the poet shares what we’ve been privy to all along, that is, that they do, quite radiantly, “resolve the view, unstriped and entire."
 

"To read these poems is to feel transfigured in the splinters of a strobe light: Phone scrolling, the dishes, street protest, work functions — “skin L E A K S / the world comes I N” — we find ourselves in a strange choreography, one it turns out we’ve been performing all along. Science tells us the present lasts but three seconds. “That means that every three seconds, we produce ourselves again as strangers.” (Jenny Erpenbeck) Paty is the poet of this ongoingness as acute disequilibrium."