A few years ago, I attended a workshop run by Christopher Salerno. At one point he said (and I’m paraphrasing a bit here) that a successful poem should hit the reader in the mind, the heart, and the gut. The forty-five poems in this fine volume are all mightily successful. Some throw stronger punches to the heart, or the gut, than others. And some ask the reader to do a little bit of mental work to achieve that mind smack. But the sheer beauty of the language, the personal epiphanies that translate to universal realizations, and the masterful craftwork make this collection eminently readable and a natural choice for reading again and again.
The Man Grave is divided into three sections – We Always Were the Dying Type, Deathbed Sext, and The Heart is Wet, You are Only Sick. This collection is about family connections and breaking free of some of them. It is also about manliness and how damaging some of the concepts of masculinity can be, fostering violence and cruelty and lack of understanding. And this collection is also about dealing with medical challenges; some life-threatening and some life fulfilling. There are three poems titled IVF, each dealing with aspects of the difficulties and remedies involved in conceiving a child with a specialist’s help:
……………...I’m here to account for
those wobbly or frail sperm that veer
like the shopping cart with a shitty wheel
These lines sit guiltily right in the middle of what could have been a long joke of a poem. But the narrator’s voice seems to drop on the page into a tone of many mixed and conflicting emotions, creating layer upon layer of pathos without a hint of wasted sentimentalism, until the reader is completely engaged in what is, ultimately, a very personal and private story. Each one of these three poems has the same qualities.
This collection digs into false masculinity; how it is formed from one generation to the next, how it is revealed to one’s self-awareness, how it can become a burden, and finally, how it can be shed. Each poem confronts an issue or emotion. Each personal revelation adds a bit of knowledge that helps us understand the failed perceptions of manhood. In Beta Male Notebook a simple couplet forms a question that metaphorically illustrates a large part of this book’s search:
Question: brother, was that you weeping in your shed this morning
