In her recently-released debut book of poems, The Mirror of Simple Souls, Leah Flax Barber, OC ’18, guides the reader into the metonymic realm of the carnival. Subverting convention, she tries to discern how identity is both performed and built through experience in her poems. Taking this idea even further, she also seeks to make sense of the performativity and limitations of language.

The collection begins with an epigraph, a quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The correct and interesting thing to say is not to say, ‘This has come from that,’ but ‘It could have come from that.’” Framing the narrative, Flax Barber reveals that her entire collection of poems grounds itself in the notion that ideas are drawn from different sources and given new life through interaction with other experiences. 

Flax Barber continues to set the tone for her poetry through the distinct titles she gives her collection, as well as the sections within: “The Mirror of Simple Souls,” “Columbina,” “Cryptomnesia,” and “Saturnalia.” In doing so, she makes a collage of disparate worlds and brings together alternate realities to make sense of her own ideas.

The book’s eponymous companion, Marguerite Porete’s 14th-century collection of meditations, explores the process of obtaining divine love, something Porete claims is only accessible through experience rather than language. Flax Barber takes this idea of obtaining divine love and applies it to other theoretical approaches to understanding the self and its origin. She then divides the book into three sections: the stock character of commedia dell’arte, Columbina; the unconscious memory bias, cryptomnesia; and, finally, the subversive Roman carnival grounded in counterculture.

Each poem flows from the preceding one, and the combined words hold up a mirror to the reader, asking us to reconsider how we understand something, how we make up an identity, and, finally, how language conveys meaning.

In her poem titled “The Mirror of Simple Souls,” she speaks to the precise moment when you are bewildered at something until a previous experience provides the necessary context for understanding: “The title The Mirror of Simple Souls implies / That a book is a mirror / It cures the soul of its complication / By manipulating its reflection / Or revealing it. / A book like a mirror / Is held to the face.”

Flax Barber perfectly encapsulates this feeling of insight, when a specific type of genius unconsciously spurs on understanding. However, she also understands that memory is distorted and untrustworthy. In that way, despite feeling liberation through language and ideas, our memories can lead us to a false truth. The mirror is a perfect vignette for understanding this phenomenon: we look into it for an objective truth, but what we see instead is what we want to project, not an authentic self. Language and memory can operate in the same fashion; we might contort a truth to illuminate what we seek to illuminate. 

What Flax Barber shows us in this poem is that nothing is ever truly simple, objective, or plain; instead everything possesses a unique code that reflects concepts differently. Experience, however, appears to be what Flax Barber values above all. She stresses that these interactions are the catalyst for memory, even though memory inevitably alters the original facts.

Her poem “Entr’acte” revels in this experiential learning: “You discover / Your open hand / And the action          is clear / As a flip-book / Senses dot the periphery / Of my continent / Before          like islands           we are led.”

Here, Flax Barber describes a sensory moment arising from touch, one that awakens a new perception in the other. This revelation — perhaps about the self, the environment, or something else entirely — is found not in the primary event, but the subtle edges of the experience. 

Her poetic style is revelatory not just in the ideas she explores, but in her sentence construction as well. The list-like structure of her poems and the intentional spaces within her poems, render the meaning of each phrase profound and the silences become thundering, making it so that the structure itself has invisible barriers that threaten to be crossed by the readers and the forthcoming words.

Flax Barber uses her words to gesture, informing readers of the meaning of the silence. By giving her words autonomy, she reconciles with the performativity of language, and she herself contorts and manipulates meaning to promote her ideas.

Even at a broader level, the structure of her book is also conspicuous; there is no clear end or beginning; rather, each idea comes from something else, something that already exists, and each word echoes the other. In this way, there is no truth gained; rather, an experience that guides you to something within yourself. 

Flax Barber reminds us of the fluidity of the world we exist in. Our words, our ideas, our revelations are generated through experience and come from what already exists. While it can be frightening to think that our identities cannot be fixed to a single thing or that our thoughts are not unique, this mode of thinking is also incredibly freeing, as it suggests that we can shape ourselves through our various connections. The Mirror of Simple Souls offers us an opportunity to partake in a type of rebirth, seeing, experiencing, living changes us, and could be something to look forward to, especially today.