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.
