The Brooklyn Rail

Fog: when we think of it, we think hazily—brain fog on our minds, in our mouths, these past years. What do we understand again?

Tony Leuzzi’s elegiac Fog Notes delves into the self in moments of doubt and recall, offering sleight-of-hand syllabics and measured metrics to metamorphose objects—“suspended from the rafter beams / her dresses look like salted fish”—and re-form memories in eerily embodied shape: the childhood self who “soiled myself / in the middle of a baseball game” now appears again, so physical the speaker “followed the little boy all the way home.” In “Psalm,” a man “fragments / into song the song” and song has texture as well as sound: “music / like pink / and blue / bedsheets” (a lovely pun on “sheet music” that speaks to the collection’s wit and whimsy).

Senses commingle amid the fog. “I’ll eat what I cannot pronounce,” one poem promises, “so long as it’s served on leaves / beside a plate of lemon wedges”: the pleasures of sustenance overlap with other oral pleasures, the last word of the Lord’s Prayer, “evil,” becoming a “clipped i / followed by a lustful l / that begged the tongue / […] to free itself.” That reworking of the Lord’s Prayer is a mondegreen, a mishearing leading to new realizations. “Hallowed” is heard as “hollowed” and “to be delivered from” provokes within the child (and adult) self a confusion against the evidence “of trucks that carried / food to stores.”

Fog Notes works by such verbal transubstantiations. In the opening poem, “In the Square,” a man is “counting cobblestones” while, ignored, “his daughter / […] stood beside a copper soldier / mimicking its hero pose.” At some point—and, like an optical illusion, the moment where one thing becomes another cannot quite be found—the daughter is no longer flesh but statuesque, “a mourning dove / alighted on her outstretched arm.”

This is no trickery: the pleasure of an optical illusion is in illumination, proliferation. In these dexterous (at times, ambidextrous) poems, fog is not disorientation, for the book’s title is subject-predicate more than adjective-noun: fog notes, draws attention, sketches—mementos to the self, tasting notes, half-caught snatches of music. What Keats called “negative capability” materializes in the outstanding centerpiece, “Fog”:

the space
between articulation and un-
knowing is the fluency of fog

Fog, Leuzzi teaches us, is the comprehension found in the hyphen a line break creates in un/knowing. “Fog is that it has its own language”; the fogginess of pondering is what matters. In our post-factual times, we reach for certainty, yet our self-confidence, our conviction we know it all and no one else can say it ain’t so, may well lead us nowhere. Fog Notes lets us stave that off a little, lets us rethink ourselves, lets our recollections shimmer.

“Another word I’m reaching for is,” one section of “Fog” ends, and while the next completes it—“doubt”—we linger in that reach for a while. Even when “doubt” is what we reach for, we find it is

some say “a source of great distress”
but can it not as well erect
a palace of the possible?

In this fog, words won’t resolve. “The father dying in that cot / was not the father I call father,” the speaker says, wrestling with how to know and name a parent at their point of passing. His mother pours water from a kettle “older than me into a cup older / than she,” a circular line naming a relative age that only the same word can speak.

Fog Notes recounts such losses, including in “diminishing sonnets” which shrink as they proceed, a kind of minor key haunting the collection. Whatever solace religion might offer hovers amid the secular: “habits? God yes, them as well.” Fog Notes is a book of grief and loss, of physical passing and of losing loved ones to dementia—or, perhaps to their own minds, for in its grief Fog Notes is, like Peter Gizzi’s Threshold Songs, a book of finding, and of being found. In the fairy tale-like “Drifting,” “a weaver with my eyes met mine,” the separation of one body and one self from another dissolved entirely.

Some two hundred years ago, in 1817, German physician Georg Greiner described “brain fog” as the “fogging of the light of reason”—an apt epithet for Leuzzi’s admirable book, so long as we know we want and need such fogging, content “to roam among uncertainties,” as the speaker admits in “One Night,” responding to a friend’s confession that “he sold himself for fifty bucks” and “was made / to sweep the floor in nothing but an apron.” There’s no censorship to not knowing, just “deriving pleasure from / a wilderness of doubt” in poems which deliver us from—yes, from—certainty.