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.”

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Most of us don’t know how to deal with the reality of the unrealities in which we find ourselves living. Wood shows us one way to do so—and it’s a great one, one in which we can be real. — Lyn Hejinian

Anyone who in recent years has been paying attention to what’s going on in the public sphere, the media, and even in one’s private life will perceive in the title of Emma Winsor Wood’s brilliant book The Real World a curl of irony. That is certainly present—and for good reason. The main instrument at work in what one might call the perpetual modernization of the cultural environment is reality production, the generation of commodities and simulacra and the fostering of a taste, and even a desire, for them. Emma Winsor Wood has made herself literate in the vernacular of this “real world,” watching its ongoing commodity melodramas, witnessing the dramatic unwinding and rewinding of streamed realities. And she has done so while conducting a wry and surprisingly happy flirtation with cynicism. That happiness is fostered by Wood’s sense of the absurd as in many ways glorious, as for example in the magnificent final work in the book, “Westworld,” a foray into a landscape of triumphant pathos and ridiculous sublimity. The hilarity may be worth the trip. Most of us don’t know how to deal with the reality of the unrealities in which we find ourselves living. Wood shows us one way to do so—and it’s a great one, one in which we can be real.

— Lyn Hejinian

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