"They deny that the game happened entirely" - A Review of America at Play

America at Play by Mathias Svalina

America at Play cover.jpg

Mathias Svalina’s, America at Play, was published early last year by Boulder’s very own up and coming Trident Press. This whimsical and dark book takes on a hybrid form made up of instructions and descriptions of children’s games, and it encompasses so disquietingly well what it is to grow up an American.

 I get a sense of dread reading these poems, conjured back from my own childhood. “Schooltime is an ever-closing circle,” Svalina writes, “each child must be taught secret restraints.” Our sense of endless possibility is bent into the closed and limited space of society when we enter those early structures of school.

 In these games, children learn to be American. They face adversity and humiliation. They are conditioned to avoid being the odd one out, the “It child,” at all costs, even when it requires cruelty. The darkness of this permeates the book with surreal and disturbing consequences. In one game, “the It child must continue to run around the circle, stopping at every child to shake hands and apologize until their over-shaken fingers pop off one by one with an audible popping sound, like the opening of a grape jelly jar” (9).

 America’s capitalist ideologies are at large throughout, and the monstrosity that our individualist dogma generates in even our youngest members is apparent. Someone always has to be in an unsavory or subordinate position for the games to function. The It child or the frog. The antagonist or the object of ridicule and contempt.

 Some children escape the games, like the last child in the Water Sprite game who does not turn into a glass of river water when his name is finally called. Some children lose their way, like the jumpers in “Crossing the Brook” who never can get back home. I wonder about these children who seem to disappear into the world’s mists as Svalina develops a dreamlike air of chance that completely intoxicates, until suddenly the poems force a yawn of sobriety. “The sun above the playing space feels larger then, looming. The teachers come and mop up all the mess” (22).

 Svalina raises the stakes as the book goes one, pulling us through Play Games, Games for Older Children, Rites of Passage, and building up to the final section of War Games. In one haunting poem called “Becoming an Adult,” children deny all the absurd pain and suffering they went through in the game after it’s through. They deny that the game happened entirely. It seems we must dissociate from the torment we experience in order to make it through to the adulthood that Capitalist America desires for us.

 We seem to reach a near eclypse of hope as the end of the book approaches. “Massacre,” one of that last poems, discusses “how the body becomes the equivalent of a chair or wire hanger,” reduced to a prop. In this poem, “each child holds a blindfold up to their own eyes.” This is their extermination, but the blindfolds are comforting “like a mother’s hand” (82). Thank goodness some buoyancy arrives in the last few “Instructions.” Svalina advises us; “Be the thing no rule can bind” (87).

 All of these games teach us to follow suit, to get lost in our pursuits until we are so far from home that we may never return, to be cruel in order to avoid denigration, to assimilate and blind ourselves. It will feel so comforting and easy, we are lulled — it will feel like our own mother’s touch, if we just follow the rules. Svalina shows us the shadows that are inside us all in America at Play, and how they are drawn out from our earliest experiences and on. But we don’t have to play the game by its rules, Svalina urges us; you can be the bird that does not fly into the window.

Leah White is a poet originally from Tempe, Arizona. She currently lives in Denver, Colorado where she teaches creative writing, works on TIMBER, and runs reading series Static Parade.

Issue 11.1

Review, TIMBER TalksTimber JournalMathias Svalina, Leah White