The Voyage of Parenthood: A Review of LITTLE ASTRONAUT by J. Hope Stein

Little Astronaut by poet J. Hope Stein captures the wonder, joy, and isolation of new motherhood. The title compares the psychological experience of parenting an infant to traveling with a small crew aboard a spaceship, and several pieces convey and build on this metaphor, including "Lullaby for Voyager," "A Toast to the Dark Side of Earth," and, of course, the short titular poem.

The poems in Little Astronaut reflect a variety of emotions, from the humor of a child's public announcement in a natural history museum that "monkey-people have boobs!" to the sweet reflection that a mother holding her infant daughter can look like just one being in the bathroom mirror.

Stein doesn't shy away from the earthy: we see how pregnancy affects her sex life, the cabbage leaves she uses as a remedy for excessive milk production while weaning her daughter, the songs they sing to poop while toilet training, and the occasional cuss word. The "gross" is occasionally intertwined with the hilarious: "Daddy, don't drop your penis in the toilet!" and the tender, in a poem where Stein races to remove cat poop from the baby's mouth, and at the close of the piece, scars on different parts of Stein's body "speak" to each other as she sleeps holding her daughter, who will not sleep in her crib. This reflects the experience of parenting in its physicality and sweetness.

Yet, her work reflects sophisticated knowledge of and fascination about many aspects of the world: space exploration, fetal development, evolutionary history. And, a deep tenderness towards her little family, including her husband (who does the dishes!) and especially her tiny daughter, Oona.

Motifs of fanciful childhood imagination are scattered through these pages. A rock becomes a symbol of power. Stein wakes to tea parties, fairies, confetti, and glitter. She also engages in her own adult fantasies of being cast in a movie by a famous director (as well as fears, as she recollects the "universal cinematic language " of miscarriage). Yet, sometimes, in the same pieces, ordinary rocks, seashells, and dirt get mentioned right alongside the fairy dreams. Our actual world can be just as amazing as fantasy, especially when seen through the eyes of a child.

Poems here are of varying lengths: some extend over multiple pages, and others consist of two lines. This reflects Stein's versatility as a writer and also the way thoughts and emotions occur to us while we have an intense experience. Sometimes, there's a lot to say, but other times, one sentence is more than enough.

The quick vs lengthy bursts of thought also recall and evoke Stein's space travel metaphor. Time is measured differently in space due to the varying orbits of planets. Days and years as we understand them can be minute or nearly eternal elsewhere in space with Earth's migration as a reference. So, as we "spacewalk" through Oona's early childhood, there are naturally a balance of short interjections of feelings and observations and longer periods of reflection. And sometimes, during the toddler years, "every number on the clock is replaced by the word now/and the hands of now always pointed at two nows."

As explorers might spend extensive time solely with each other for company, the little family develops their own language of love. From the earliest newborn days, Oona's little mouth resembles a parenthesis, a device to hold and contain the sounds and words she will eventually say.

Some words in the pieces are modified to reflect the toddler's way of speaking. The three create their own music when Oona's tiny hands slap her father's belly like a drum. In one rich piece, at three years old, she writes "Oonadad" in bright pink on the driveway with her own self styled punctuation, exclaiming that the word means that Oona and Dad love each other very much.

This collection follows the Steins through Oona's learning to crawl (An Infant Reaches) through the baby's first steps and eventually to her walking and dancing. Stein references dancing in several poems, from the relief she finds from her doctor's announcement that the baby is healthy and "dancing" in her womb to a piece where her husband plays guitar and sings lullabies to Oona and the three dance together. Dancing is something people do for fun when we're happy, which this family is, but also a metaphor for navigating a complex situation, losing and regaining balance, which is part of the physical and psychological journey of parenthood.

Themes of food and nourishment also run through this collection as symbols of love and connection as well as sustenance. Stein relates her own hesitation at weaning Oona from the breast "a little less and a little less, and then no more/but tonight, a little more." She becomes wistful at the close interaction her daughter has with a cup that covers her face as she sips.

In a later poem, she reveals her poignant reason for her reluctance to wean: psychologically, she does not want to give up her ability to nourish her daughter from her own body without depending on the unpredictable outside world. Even grounded on Earth, life can be unpredictable: she’s vulnerable to her own memory and planning lapses as well as to economic and political threats.

Of course, human growth, as well as space exploration, requires separation from the known and the familiar. Oona must eventually step out of the "mothership" for a spacewalk of her own. A section, "tethering," references the parents' process of letting Oona grow while still nurturing her under their care.

The final poem, "The foot" highlights the motif of watching a child grow. Stein reflects that Oona used to be a "ceramicist/molding the elasticity of her skin." Now, at three, her daughter is more than half the length of her body as the two curl up together in bed. Yet, her foot still massages her mother’s stomach as they sleep, although now from the outside.

Like the recordings and images on Voyager 1 and 2, which make appearances in several pieces, children are "probes" we send to the greater world out beyond our own existence. In this way, the baby becomes a "little astronaut" traveling through time.

J. Hope Stein's Little Astronaut is a complex yet relatable ode to parenthood. It highlights the joy and wonder of bringing small children into the world, an experience both personal and cosmic.

Illusions of Solid Ground: A Review of YEAR OF THE MURDER HORNET by Tina Cane

While the pandemic was such a repetitious and monotonous period of time, Tina Cane brilliantly provides a unique lens with which to view those haunting years.Year of the Murder Hornet offers a microscopic deep dive into many facets of quarantine life. It allows for wordplay within experimental poems, without becoming oversentimental nor apocalyptic. The wry, humorous, choppy lines in many of the works provide a sense of ease, yet a solemn place for reflection, as well. There is a heightened sensation of unpredictability, which portrays the disjointed, disconnected, mental state of the speaker and many people, for that matter. Societal issues loom large. The threats of racism, gentrification, conspiracy theories, the divisiveness of cable news, and the titular threat of murder hornets are tackled within the comfort (and discomfort) of home. Orderly stream of conscious confessional poems evolve and morph, revealing the blurred lines of the personal and the political. From the first page to the last, it is sharply proven that “memory is a poet / not an historian.”

There is such musicality in each poem’s freewheeling enjambment, which produces kinetic verses, as one is forced to travel back and search for meaning. The complex vocabulary of the pandemic intermingles with layers of experience, “...America / least American Dream-iest of lands” “where like most / I hoard the future and try not to be afraid,” when there was so much to fear. Mentions of “snags in food chains, quarantine baking fails, celebrities sheltering-in, and time no longer having meaning,” all come together in a reckoning from the relative safety of this side of the pandemic-present, “the illusion of solid ground.”

“But what if the thinking / never ends?” Yet feelings of despair and uncategorical delight can occupy the same realms as “this delicate dispatch / to the images I store / of evergreen California / or Ashbery’s / chorus of trees / a stash of small prayers / and promises.” After all, “truth is in / the feeling not the facts.” Repetition recreates the monotony of daily life, only to be punctuated by natural internal rhymes both dynamic and purposeful. These mimic the sparks of unexpected joy that dotted the landscape of distanced schedules. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Paths: A Narrative in Captions” captures the labyrinthian mental and physical passages the speaker takes as they “Walk to Stay Sane” or are “Trying Hard in Trying Times.” This winding piece is in part a collection of daily diary entries, while also a meditative cataloguing of routines, seeking to quell overwhelming fear and anxiety. This captions-style narrative connects two distinct parts of this book, a poetic path unto itself leading the way, while warning, “every day is endless / shortcuts are conditional.”

Every poem reveals a journey narrated by conversations shared between poet and reader, speaker and characters, before posing questions back again. Images succinct as “a cornish hen / houses in a bell jar” commingle with lushly abstract ones like “everything’s gone to hell / since David Bowie died.” Yet a turn of the page doesn’t solve the mystery of the whole, nor the command,  “stay tuned to souls / that brood and to poets / who like finches in cages / sense the changes / before they come.” This work begs to be reread, to revisit surreal settings, and to relive the collective emotions, contained within the real and fantasized places held dear in times of trouble.

Grief and Gravity: A Review of ANCHOR by Rebecca Aronson

“A body” writes Rebecca Aronson in her new collection, Anchor, “is a just a set of nerves in fur and spangles.” Yet these nerves at the core of our simple being can turn our lives into a labyrinth of emotion. A brief, breathtaking journey through the viewpoint of an adult child who must navigate her own parents’ decline and passing, Anchor deftly sidesteps the maudlin or macabre and invites us into a new reckoning with mortality.

Death waits just beyond the next page in this collection. The imminence of mortality, almost more than mortality itself, troubles the speaker. In a series of letter poems addressed “Dear gravity,” she cajoles the broader forces in the world—specifically, those that knock her father off his literal and metaphorical balance—for understanding of why they must do what they do. Such knowledge can’t empower us but is learning for knowing; as the speaker laments, “how vexing to be made an instrument/that measures only what can’t be mastered.” The lack of control and its associated pain cut deep in these poems, even as the narrative tension keeps us reading.

Aronson captures the absurd heartbreak of dementia with particular accuracy. One day, the devastation is palpable, and, as in “Source,” the speaker laments of her mother, “she has forgotten everything/she ever wondered.” Yet as many loved ones of dementia patients know, there are also moments of levity, as in “My Mother at the Gate”: “Sometimes/kindness descends like a fever. We walk the halls/laughing at nonsense and are briefly cheerful.” We cling to what we can, and we shake off or sit with what we wish to forget.

At once expansive and microcosmic, Anchor scrutinizes all levels of deterioration and forces at work in our world. Environmental degradation stands on its own and as a metaphor for the smaller crumblings that feel astronomical to individuals but are insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Contemplating the smoking, burning land around her in “Fire Country,” Aronson writes “the air is thick/with other people’s fires. And my own burning/is so small as to go unnoticed.” Amid all the damage that our “toddler species” does to ourselves and our planet, the individual struggles seem trivial.

Yet Aronson’s poems continually validate the significance of griefs, “those awkward pointed stars/there is no easy way to hold,” no matter how small they seem in the cosmic scheme of things. We’re reminded that even seemingly evanescent things have its importance and impact, even “the petal of your life which is brief, which is delicate and weightier than you know,” as is the chrysanthemum that gives the poem its name.

Even as its focus involves death, the cyclic nature of life crops up periodically in the collection as Aronson reminds us that those we are losing once stood in our shoes. Parenthood comes into a new focus when seen from the middle position of both being and raising a child: the “endless falling and fear of failing” that we don’t understand until we enter.

The range of responses to grief, including the struggle against the inevitable, give the collection depth and authenticity. There’s angst, resistance to the prospect of loss, anxiety, magical thinking, and eventually, a tentative consideration of the future without. “Maybe there will be hauntings,” the speaker muses in “Manifestation,” or “breaths/in the still air at significant moments, tea leaves/I will ask for advice.” We don’t get a neat resolution, a fully processed grief—instead, we stand with the speaker and look forward to a future that will come, even when we can hardly think about what it could be.

Little goes unexamined in Anchor, though “Ode” hints at a strain of deliberate identity shift, duplicity even, that piques readers’ curiosity in its difference from the other themes woven through the collection. A few other poems touch on the speaker’s own complex identity—namely “The Dress I Loved” and “Is That All There Is?”—but we’re left wanting just a bit on this front.

Like many of the best poetry collections, Anchor does not give its readers an easy ride, but the resulting catharsis, coupled with the lyricism of Rebecca Aronson’s verse, make this book a deeply moving and worthwhile read.

Have Grief, Will Travel: A Review of 2 A.M. WITH KEATS by Eileen Cleary

2 a.m. with Keats records Eileen Cleary’s earthbound efforts to communicate with her beloved/mentor, deceased poet Lucie Brock-Broido. This thin body of lyric poems unveils themes of grief, loss, and loneliness. Cleary’s prominent use of silence, achieved in part by superimposing inky language against a blanched-out landscape, gives voice to, if you will, an already established sense of unworldliness through the performance of listening. In this way, Cleary creates a two-fold dimensionality in her poems. This landscape does not stop at itself; in fact, the silence it creates necessarily transcends the limitations of convention and thought. It becomes the space that holds the erased: Cleary’s beloved. In this liminal space, the poet yearns, hurts, and presses for the retrieval of her beloved. At the mouth of this portal to the afterlife, (which we learn is unboundaried, is everywhere) the author dialogues, listens, and waits. Cleary is both witness and interlocutor, a player in her own play. We, too, are invited to participate in this performance. As a result, we directly experience Cleary’s emotions with an immediacy as if they are our own. These interstitial spaces are arguably most exciting when Cleary utilizes call and response, a form that recedes and expands our unconscious, where we can neither be singular or indifferent. When John Keats pirates the space that Cleary opens, the expectation of both speaker and reader are subverted. The spirit of Keats acts as veil: he is an obstruction to Cleary’s purpose (to reach Brock-Broido). Although the poetry of Keats bridges the two on earth, the character of Keats’ ghost, contaminates Cleary’s objective. To be sure, the process of connecting with the dead is easily fraught with distractions and detours. John Keats, oddly comforting to Cleary, serves as both Cleary’s and Brock-Broido’s stand-in or wingman. He is  revelator of otherwise personal information about their relationship because Cleary cannot speak it, and Brock-Broido is erased:

(        )

I’m not your first
platonic lover.
You’re not mine.

(         )

During winter, mine read
to me—her Harvard
sweats awkwardly tied,
and she wanted to last
like the Eucharist—
and be preserved in vellum. 

Although the next stanza intentionally shifts, “Let’s think of something else,” Cleary knows that the process continues, and that she must rip through the veil.

“2 a.m. with Keats” is the table piece of the eponymous collection. There is an otherworldly feel to its 53 brief stanzas, each marked by open and closed parenthesis—no numerals—creating a hollowness that amplifies Keats’ visitation:

Your apparition sings
in the corner of my room—
then listens, your ear warm
and veined, trained toward me.

(      )

Cleary suggests that there is no need for numbers, or flesh for that matter. The speaker is surprised by the ghost of Keats. After all, it is not this poet but the poet-mentor for whom Cleary yearns:

(      )

How is that you made
your way to me? Are you
interplanetary? Have you
cut through elderberry?

(      )

Keats is the wrong one and Cleary asks the wrong questions: She is silenced by the trauma of loss. Keats has a message from Brock-Broido. Why does Cleary interrupt him?

(      )

Lucie said she—
I thought you might be her.
Which makes this the first night of peace.
The cattle at the fence, breach—
chew the same grasses
while I absorb what consumes you.

(      )

Here, the language shifts to rhyme which disturbs the poem’s tone. Is this caused by the deteriorating energy of the spirit? Cleary’s inaccurate translation of the ghost? Or is it simply form and content marrying? Here, dialogue ownership blurs. There is beauty and truth in the collapse of internal structure: Singular becomes both, or delightfully many. Throughout 2 a.m. with Keats, Cleary erases the boundaries of both voice and body while giving shape to the overlapping realities that are at play. The author’s dialogue echoes similar metaphysical questions in Hamlet as exemplified in this ghost scene:

Enter Ghost

Marcellus
Peace, break thee off! Look where it come again.
Barnardo
In the same figure like the King that’s dead.
Marcellus
Thou art a scholar. Speak to it, Horatio.
Barnardo
Looks he not like the King?  Mark it, Horatio.
Horatio
Most like. It harrows me with fear and wonder.
Barnardo
It would be spoke to.
Marcellus
Speak to it, Horatio.

Hamlet I.1. 47-53.

Like the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father, and as the dead who visit earth, Cleary has tremendous energy which is required of her to discern between that which she hears as herself and that which she hears as spirit. Sadly, like so many of us, Cleary does not yet trust the dead or herself, “I can’t convince myself that it’s you.”

By engaging Keats, who is Brock-Broido’s gatekeeper of sorts, Cleary will see her Beloved. The beauty of Cleary’s art is that she trusts the process of writing, of poetry, and of getting through to the one she loves. 2 a.m. with Keats subverts the conventional paradigm of death-after-death by addressing the imaginary wall that separates us from the “undiscovered country.” Cleary teaches the reader that the undiscovered country exists, and we can access it to gain comfort from those we loved who live there now.  

In “Confrontation with the Unconscious” Carl Jung writes about his experiments with the anima:

“The psychic material which is the stuff of psychosis is found in the insane…But it is also the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age.”

Cleary, like Jung, bypasses psychosis through the force of her “mythopoeic imagination.” Imagination does not cause Cleary to see falsely, it is a vehicle to communicate with her beloved. William Blake teaches us to “look through it, not at it,” and Cleary does. Her imagination is fierce as her desire.

Jung continues:

“Though such imagination is present everywhere, it is both tabooed and dreaded, so that it even appears to be a risky experiment or a questionable adventure to entrust oneself to the uncertain path that leads into the depths of the unconscious” (my italics).

Jung’s statement clarifies the significance of Cleary’s work which reminds us that the imagination is omnipresent and cannot be compromised.

Two a.m. with Keats is an interactive five-dimensional roadmap that may save our lives. Cleary’s fierce grief-journey is medicine not just for those who grieve;  it is for those who are oppressed by the byproducts of hyper-capitalism, namely fear, isolation and dispossession. Indeed, we are all on an uncertain path, and Cleary, through example, reminds us to trust ourselves and life.

Traveling to Find the Way Back Home: A Review of THE FORGOTTEN WORLD by Nick Courtright

Nick Courtright’s collection The Forgotten World serves as both a travel guide, with the countries he visits indicated in each section, and a collage of connected memories. While the poet seems to invite the reader along, the persona in the poems is a solitary figure, even when a lover or fellow travelers inhabit the poems. What ties the poems together is a sense of alienation. The collection opens with a call to prayer the speaker cannot answer in “Facing Mecca,” juxtaposing images of Walmart and test scores—first world concerns—with dirhams, cobras, and niqabs.

In the first section, titled “Forgotten,” (like the other two divisions of the book), the speaker acknowledges feeling out of place, noting in “I Cannot Enter the Mosque”:

When irreligious
you can only go some places,

like bars, or houses, or heaven.
But I can’t go here . . .

Whether in Morocco, Ecuador, Paris or London, the speaker finds himself in mosques, chapels and cathedrals, never places of comfort for him. Likewise, the focus on the culture and the history of each place visited seems to highlight guilt as “a spoiled American / who is a voyeur on the. heritage of those / who have heritage. . . .”

Courtright chronicles the time “Before Falling Out of Love,” telling his lover:

I couldn’t really make sense
of my happiness . . .

. . . You were there
and I couldn’t make sense of it.

Through the poem, though, he moves from his incredulity at “fucking in Africa” amid warthogs and zebras to his ironic observation, “Eventually I’ll be back / in my bed in America after having / set my family on fire…” Courtright follows with “Falling Out of Love,” bearing images of a house afire, a setting in stark contrast to Africa:

The flame moves in on the house this weekend,
the clever box and its faux wood flooring
and whitewash cabinets, too many white
cabinets, the flame moving in and through,

the flame brandishing its sad ancient dance
of romance and boyish extravagance . . .

The former lover—the you, half of we—has barely a presence.

Courtright also invokes the presence of artists and writers in the places he travels. In “Frida Kahlo Atop the Pyramid of the Sun,” he finds himself thinking of the artist, finding himself “a spy in her bedroom” as he sees “the dresses she wore, / the mirrors in which she became real.”

In “American Idiot,” the speaker, feeling out of place in South America, recalls Orwell’s autobiographical short story “Shooting an Elephant” in which he finally understands Orwell’s observation “that a colonist is always in a battle / not to be laughed at.” He notes that “the role of every white man in this world / is to shut up and take it / because so much of this bed you for yourself have made.”

The second section, set across Europe and Asia, opens with “Airplane to Bangkok,” on an overseas flight, the characters in the in-flight movie as real as the flight attendant, “Thirty years older and thirty for popularity” or the “aggressively elderly woman . . . / [who] did not smile at me when I smiled at her / Her fingers . . . twisted like the branches of desert trees . . .”

Some of the poems examine the seeming absurdity of sights he witnesses, the poverty and stacks of skulls in “Inside Everyone is a Skull,” as well as the repeated image of “A monkey [pulling] over the rope railing protecting a priceless / work of stone-carved temple art.”

Others are set in the artificial world of opulent airports, images of wealth and privilege that weigh on this lone traveler. In “Inside Everyone is a Wallet,” he finds himself in ‘The United Lounge for the wealthy and privileged.” He observes:

It’s difficult to decline such opportunity

As if that opulence weren’t enough to make anyone feel
awful 

There’s an elevator with golden sheen going up to a room
reserved for the Global First Class.

Ill at ease, the speaker continues to find himself in places of worship, considering transubstantiation and confession, the sacred and profane. He finds himself weeping, “God, please help me” in “the prayer-only section” of Notre Dame in “Happy New Year” or in Westminster Abbey, confessing to the reader, “I took the holy sacrament without belief” in “Insanity.”

Throughout this leg of the virtual tour through The Forgotten World, the poems conjure disparate images of literary figures. In Prague, he evokes images of “Good Kind Wenceslas”:

. . . boots in the snow,
like two bird in the snow,
striding with purpose
toward his aim, on the day-
of the feast of Stephen.”

The imaged conjured causes the speaker to “tear up / in an all-you-can-eat all-you-can / drink buffet in Budapest,” until he considers the king’s page, along on the wintry journey “with no agency.”

He imagines “Dracula’s Last Day,” as an anachronism, as he “gets up and responds to some emails, / texts a girl or two he’s been after,” ending the poem with a woman “stake in hand” knocking at his door.

In the final section of the collection, Courtright returns to the United States. The poems still echo with travel images but focus more on the domestic—fathers, mothers, and sons. Both as  son and as father of sons, the speaker bears the guilt of not loving his mother enough, not knowing how to offer his father consolation.

In “My Mother Shaving Her Legs,” he observes, “In time all children are disappointments . . . because they don’t love back the way they should.” Then he turns the tables, addressing his son in with images from his own travels in “Oblique Letter to Young Son as He Confronts Adolescent Loneliness for the First Time”:

When the water is all around you
you know you are the land, son.
. . . .
But
let’s not be bleak; you, son,

are the land, the firmament
filled with surprise. . .

Though the collection moves from travels abroad back to home, in the final section, Courtright draws on the motif of travel to unify this body of work. In “Apples,” he writes, “To travel the world is one thing / and to travel the mind / is the same thing” before declaring, “The time to wander prodigal / may be over but I’ll wonder / where wandering led.”

As Courtright concludes the third section of The Forgotten World, back in America, his readers are faced with timely cultural references as the poet unpacks the experiences, images, and conflicted feelings from his journey, until at last, in “We Can’t Leave the House,” the speaker finds himself with his children in the bubble that is home, “wait[ing] out the virus” with time to come to terms with who he is, who we are.

Too Restless to Conclude: A Review of CHALK SONG by Gale Batchelder, Susan Berger-Jones, and Judson Evans

Traditionally the ekphrastic poem pairs a single still image with a text, creating a tension between the spatial characteristics of the image and the temporal movement of the poem. The poem may perform a variety of functions, explaining, extrapolating, interpreting and setting the image into motion. It can unravel an allegory or develop a narrative that leads up to or completes the frozen moment of the icon.

In Chalk Song, Judson Evans, Gale Batchelder and Susan Berger-Jones apply the tradition to Werner Herzog’s film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a documentary about the Chauvet Cave in Southern France, the oldest site of Cave Art in Europe, a place where art history begins in the shadow of an inhuman geology that both inspires and guides its  formation. Their voices appear to emerge from the cave itself, telling  a forgotten history that suggests Plato’s cave along with the obscure borders of personal memory.

By appealing to the film  the three poets begin with an already moving image,  complicating the image/text relation by essentially working beside the film echoing its concerns and animating the cave images themselves. In Chalk Song, everything moves, the text and its immediate referent, leaving  no resting place for a definitive interpretation. The poems, while pointing back to the film and echoing each other, refuse resolution, too restless to conclude. The sequence further complicates the ekphrastic framework by appealing to an artwork that itself explores an earlier artwork. The poems then confront a site that has  already been cinematically interpreted. Refusing to treat the film as a transparent representation, the poets acknowledge it as another interpretation, another voice in a sometimes  cacophonic  chorus of voices.

The cave represents a site of origins: of art , of technology, of humanity itself. “The altar was the first machine” writes Evans in a  metaphor that  sees magic as an early form of technology. Tellingly a recurring analogy in the film sees the cave as a proto cinema, a silent film animated by moving flashlights and headlamps. One expert describes the cave art as a message transmitted from the past to the present and posits the cave drawings as the origin of figuration and  a prefiguration of film. The poems follow up on this assertion. Susan Berger-Jones refers to   “the way errata blooms/sputtered through silent films”(57). Elsewhere, the shaman in Evans’ “Sediments”, gives way to a “flickering projectionist” an image that  neatly conflates  projector and  projection, art and artist,  both of which are obscured by the passage of eons. 

Yet the shaman/projectionist remains a palpable absence in the cave’s imagery  with its by depictions of animals ranging from horses, ibex, elks, wolves, and hyenas to birds, insects and butterflies. The single exception is a minitour like creature with the body of a bison and the head of a woman. As  a scene of origins and emergence, the cave becomes a womb that asserts  a commonality with the world of creatures even as it depicts an incipient differentiation between human and animal, nature and art.

The time that haunts the sequence is both the time of projection and the longer durations of history and deep time. In a startling surreal image in Berger-Jones’ “Hunted Circus, “a child  is torn from her daguerreotype” and “fields are strewn… with charcoal horses,” a juxtaposition that  collapses the history of image-making, as it leaps  from the nineteenth century back to the stone age. Elsewhere the poets variously point  to more mundane items of the twentieth century as disparate as Polaroids, radios and the internet, all of which hark back to the red hands on the cave walls as marks of ritual and human making.

While inevitably selective, the poems address the full range of the film’s images and information and in the process its  interpreters. Gale Batchelder catalogs a number of talking heads zeroing in on their idiosyncratic histories; a circus worker who becomes an archeologist, a perfumier who locates caves by smell, a man who demonstrates archaic weapons. Each is a shaman of sorts sounding of the cave and its history for  further information and nuance.

In spite of the myriad voices  there’s a sense of continuing enigma, of the impossibility of the full knowledge of origins, of a complete return. Like the bison woman, “you can’t draw yourself out of the rock” and its mystery. “The footprints collapse into deeper footprints” writes Evans. What’s left is a sense of language echoing and, like torches,  playing over the surface of a cavern that invites speculation yet keeps its secrets.

Echoes of Duality: A Review of Brandon Rushton’s THE AIR IN THE AIR BEHIND IT

Even the cover of Brandon Rushton’s, The Air in the Air Behind It, is an invitation to consider echoes and reverberations, the shadow lives that reside in one’s daily existence. Rushton’s lines and descriptions are at once equal parts familiar and surreal. In his proem, “Milankovitch Cycles,” the setting can simultaneously contain mundane routines like calling children in for dinner, set apart by an unlikely event such as “a meteor cuts through the low cloud-cover and all the stampeding herds abruptly stop…” While Rushton gives name and shape to seemingly minuscule commonplace daily activities, one has to also be ready to navigate the unfamiliar contrasting territories that are somehow both beautiful and frightening.

The landscapes within this work evoke stark contrasts and counterpoints for consideration.  How can peaceful evening routines be tinged with dread, fear, melancholy, and doom? “Family members joined at a dinner table/bless the food, made/of chemicals bound to break their bodies/down.” Each poem begins with normalcy perhaps “kids kickstanding their bikes,” or a bus in a city “that smells and sounds just like a bus/in every other city.” There is a sense of comfort while navigating these scenes, however, these images and places quickly shapeshift to reveal poems that grapple with climate change, the end of the world, the role of the media, and how everyone’s very lives are held at the mercy of capitalistic goals and metrics. These end times feel closer than ever when visited in Rushton’s verses, well within the readers’ grasp of turning pages or the passing of another year.

Somehow Rushton likewise makes his readers certain that they aren’t the victims here and are complicit in the damages inflicted upon one another and the world. Rushton asserts “No one has enough/guts to do the good thing,” while lines later he goes on “It is so appropriately us, sizing up an abandoned/house from the street, deciding whether or not/to credit card the door lock and take a look around.” People can place blame and critique the actions of others all they want, but Rushton reminds them that no one is completely innocent in this lifetime.

Lest one think that Rushton’s work is one of indictment or preaching pithy lessons for how humans can live better, and do better; this book is a far cry from that summation. He masterfully culls together structured poems with three-line stanzas that ground, reorient, and release the tension. “The season smelled/like orchard work and you/in a dress time won’t allow me/to describe.” But he doesn’t leave anyone there for long and in fact, moves to “This place that hardly/now exists. I take a photograph/to memorialize the view. I shake it still./It is the shaking not the stillness/that persists.” Even in the calmest lines, Rushton continuously pulls the orderly rug out from under his reader, keeping them cascading into skinny short lined poems, or losing themselves in sprawling prose poems. They’re never quite sure whether they will return to a peaceful suburban town or one that makes them consider the collapse of the economy or fish washing up on a local shore. And in doing this, the reader is forced to embrace the beauty that can exist alongside the acceptance of their own eventual collapse and demise.

Rushton’s poems each connect to the next, line by line and page by page, filled with riddles of striking images to unpack and later revisit. This is a book that needs multiple readings to discover and digest all that Rushton shares. At first, a poem’s darker theme and tone stand out, but then subsequent readings reveal the work's lighter gauzy words and layers. Rushton is an expert of enjambment with dizzying turns of phrase and nuance that is concurrently succinct and poignant, yet feels effortless on the part of the poet. Whether he is exploring the dual meanings of phrases and couplings, like “puddle jumper,” or delving into the “private life is on the public train,” all will delight in savoring each one. His book is proof that when everything else is stripped away, stories are all that remain as “time/has trouble keeping up/it lengthens and then retracts.” “The wake splits behind/and then apart a lot like leaving.” The natural world and daily living are tenuous at best, but lucky enough for Rushton’s readers, The Air in the Air Behind It will be there to shepherd them through the chaos of the world.