Where Was I Again? by Olivia Muenz

Essay Press, 2022

Where Was I Again? is available now from Essay Press ($12 USD)

What is the world when your experience of it has been chopped into pieces? What are you when your sense of self fractures like a dropped mirror? Perhaps a new chapbook can help address these questions.

      Olivia Muenz’s Where Was I Again? is divided into two sections, titled “I’m here” and “but not”. This seemingly contradictory answer to the titular question evokes a dissociative relationship between the body and the mind, the mind and the self, the body and the self, the body and space/time. Many chronically ill, disabled, and trauma-surviving readers will understand this relationship immediately. Muenz invites all readers in, addressing her prose-poem monologues intimately, confrontationally, to “you”, but she’s clearly not interested in explaining anything for an audience of morbidly curious outsiders. She rejects the conventions of disability and confessional writing: there are no moments of diagnostic exposition here, no pleas for empathy. Instead, Muenz writes with casual, elliptical confidence, casting the speaker’s experiences as universally relatable. The reader may take her or leave her, understand or not understand; one suspects she’d rather be rejected on her own terms than accepted based on a conventional, clear sob story.

     Muenz’s speaker moves through a staccato of sentence fragments and short text blocks islanded in white space, where a “urine. Sample.” garnished with either “turnips or peaches” drifts among oranges, celestial bodies, lost memories, and a “dusty balloon”. Muenz writes with exquisite awareness that all lives can be seen as a series of mostly small, quickly vanishing flashes of sensation. She deftly swings between the specific and the universal, and many of what I read as specific allusions to the immanent aspects of being ill/disabled may in fact be references to the immanence of being human. “I am a big memory box,” her speaker proclaims. “I am all meat.” Who among us can’t say the same? 

      The dry, absurdist sense of humor throughout Where Was I Again? makes its poignance and sharp insight shine even more than they would in a more self-serious tone. This chapbook isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but it is consistently buoyant and playful. The structure of its short stanzas/paragraphs might even be called jokelike. We begin with a premise, we riff on it, we often end on a snappy quip. As the speaker notes, “I never run out of bits. Do you like my routine.” 

       I can only speak for myself, but yes, I certainly do.