THE REAL WORLD by Emma Winsor Wood Reviewed

THE REAL WORLD: Charles Rammelkamp enjoys an original and unusual collection by Emma Winsor Wood:

In a back-cover blurb the poet Kyle McCord describes Emma Winsor Wood’s The Real World as “an invitation to a schizophrenic internal monologue.” That invitation comes as a “business suggestion” in the first – and shortest – of the seven sequences that make up this intriguing collection, a poem called “Cold Open”:

We are currently looking to fill a vacancy

To go after the emotional jugular

So to speak

We would be thrilled to see you joining our professional team

And then comes “The Killing,” organized as a television series with nine episodes and a series finale. The series features “two damaged detectives,” hostage, criminal, gun…”Cue haunting instrumental melody” and in the end, “the good guys get away / with murder and the bad guys / aren’t really so bad.”

Clearly, The Real World, which after all is also the name of a decades-long MTV reality television series (often credited with launching the reality TV genre), plays on the notion of scripted reality, which necessarily brings in the ideas of “free will,” “authenticity,” “purpose,” etc. As the historian Daniel J. Boorstin ironically wrote (one of the epigraphs to Wood’s collection), “Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.” Or, as Wood herself writes in “The Good Place,” “This is a true story. It was on the news.”

 

 

Read the whole review of THE REAL WORLD by Emma Winsor Wood here

Read an excerpt from THE REAL WORLD by Emma Winsor Wood or buy a copy here