Book Review: Too Much Tongue

Anne Nygård

Too Much Tongue by Adrienne Marie Barrios and Leigh Chadwick, Autofocus, 2022

Reviewed by Scott Neuffer

I’ve never read anything like Too Much Tongue, a collaborative series of untitled prose poems by trampset contributors Adrienne Marie Barrios and Leigh Chadwick. Reading it is like finding a nest in your refrigerator, slapping yourself to wake up, then noticing how each wispy thread of the nest is throbbing, changing color. A feeling of magic emerges, concurrent with dread, and the nest explodes in your hands. What was presumably a home for something becomes translucent confetti in the hollow space above your head. In this way, the collection is strange, surprising, and spectacular.

I’ve long believed modernity exists in the human mind as a feeling of horror and awe. There are overgrown yards and smoldering cities. Whatever encumbered language we’ve learned scrapes against the sky, sensing escape. And maybe the poet is someone sensitive to the thick of it, both burdened and burning, subsuming the world’s fatal shapes until they’re molten. Then a shift, a breath, an echo no one has ever heard. Too Much Tongue breaks the mold as the best poetry does.

“Someone tells Adrienne Barrios, There are more than a few of us for whom life is an ache and a long red glare over the horizon.”

The poets use their own names in the third person. This has an amusing postmodern effect — making the speakers of the poems into recurring personas — but even more than self-referentiality, the method gives the poets a way to work through images intimately. And what we glean from their correspondence is that they exist in different parts of America, physically, but together as partners in poetry on the page. The book evokes pre-Musk, in-pandemic literary Twitter, circa 2020, when writers were colliding in social media and forming novel relationships. There were new modes of artistic interaction, new possibilities of hope.

“Imagine, Adriene Barrios messages Leigh Chadwick. Imagine people in a room filled with other people in a room. Leigh Chadwick can imagine but only if she squints. This is what she tells Adrienne Barrios. Leigh Chadwick also tells her if you squint harder, an entire hospital empties and if you keep squinting until your eyes are nothing but skin, it is as if you’ve never slept in sorrow.”

As fantastical as the collection is, it is grounded in real concerns of mental health, school shootings, forest fires, fear of the future, the bite of reality.

“She tries on a dress that feels like depression pretending to be lust,” reads a line. And later, “Leigh Chadwick thinks about telling Adrienne Barrios that every song is a good song to dance to if you’ve just climbed off the mountain on your bed.”

Self-consciousness is painful and bewildering but not without beauty: “Leigh Chadwick and Adrienne Barrios notice the stains on their clothes. The stains are red and shaped like the wilderness.”

And never is the book without compassion — two poets finding mutual respect and recognition in the vagaries of their lines. It feels like something new, like a masterpiece. Only Barrios and Chadwick could have written it. It feels like it couldn’t have been written any other way.

A philosopher once said a turtle holds up the world. When asked what holds up the turtle, he said turtles all the way down. After my own encounter with Too Much Tongue, I would say poetry holds up the world more than anything. It moves in invisible spaces, gives life to dead words. What holds up this book in particular? Bangers all the way down:

“Even so, they find themselves lost in the sincerity of breath. The magic of a pill. The fear of age. The dream of starlings.”