CONSTELLATION ROUTE

CONSTELLATION ROUTE BY MATTHEW OLZMANN

As snow melted and we moved into a newly unfamiliar world, without mask mandates or social distancing, Matthew Olzmann’s Constellation Route arrived like a lost bundle of parcels. Olzmann’s work is vibrant, tender, and, above all, honest about the loneliness of being ostracized from the world and ourselves. Gun violence, environmental erosion, racism, and the anxiety of things falling apart fill this collection, and yet Matthew Olzmann’s epistolary poems continue to reach out a hand. He writes to the dead, to canyons and trees, to river monsters, with language that reverberates like the grooves of a Motown record playing for an audience who, like the barkeep in “The First Official Post Office of the American Colonies (1639)”, can listen in to feel the pure expression of loss and love.

The most poignant example of this is in “Fourteen Letters to a 52-Hertz Whale,” where Olzmann asks the whale: 

Do you ever worry that because your voice is impossible to hear, maybe

no one will make the effort? That you can work really hard to be a

good person and try to make a difference in your community, but then—at

the end of the day—the waves will just swallow you whole?

If you have a long-lost love across the ocean or at the other end of the covers, or you see a world of forests and televisions on fire, or you find yourself in an alternate river of consciousness on an impossible mission to an unreal place with no chance of return, unsure of where you stand, open up Matthew Olzmann’s Constellation Route. It’s addressed to you. 

Alice James Books

—Review by D.C. Eichelberger

THE DÉJÀ VU

THE DÉJÀ VU BY GABRIELLE CIVIL

Gabrielle Civil’s the déjà vu is a portal, a performance, a dream space. The result of “mining experimental echoes,” Civil’s writing traverses space and time. It is poetry, essay, and testament: mind and genre bending. the déjà vu is as easy to pin down as a river.

A Black feminist performance artist living through civil upheaval and a pandemic, Civil gives readers pause. Poems about Black time are interspersed among pieces like “On Commemoration” and “Blue Flag” where Civil’s reflections on her own work reveal the vulnerable self-consciousness of how an artist not only reflects themselves, but how that depiction highlights or obscures marginalized peoples.

Though a performance memoir, the déjà vu hardly reads like a script for stage. Personal essays like “(Banana Traces)” offer a generous telling of how an ingenious Black artist deals with the anxiety of “talking yourself out of your own greatness.” “Unheld breath” recounts Civil’s hospitalization with the tenderness of a survivor who yearns “to be sweetly and indulgently loved,” yet has lived through so much loneliness it is near impossible to accept outstretched hands.

Gabrielle Civil’s the déjà vu is a book for the reader who needs to be reminded of their own power. It’s a book that should take up the space between their hands and reverberate throughout their own dreams.

Coffee House Press.

—Review by D.C. Eichelberger

LIFE AMONG THE TERRANAUTS

LIFE AMONG THE TERRANAUTS BY CAITLIN HORROCKS

Brimming with loneliness, isolation, and hope in impossible places, Caitlin Horrocks’s short story collection Life Among the Terranauts is a masterclass in how fiction may be “sweeter than the truth” and still haunting.     

Bookended by “The Sleep” (a 2011 Best American Short Story) and the collection’s namesake “Life Among the Terranauts,” Horrocks’s stories encapsulate lives trapped in places they must call home while they look out at unattainable possibilities. The people of Bounty, Minnesota sleeping through the depression of winter and the demise of their small town and the “terranauts'' scrabbling to survive in their biodome in the desert remind readers of the all-too-familiar anxieties of being trapped in one location, needing money that has no chance of arriving, and living in a place humanity has built and cannot sustain.

Between these two behemoths lies a personal mixtape of stories for the lonely. People take pleasure in what intimacy is available, and comfort in regret because it reminds them of who they are. Yet, there is no pity, no questions of “if only” or “what if.” Buried within Horrocks’s collection lies “Chance Me, ” a story whose often-forgotten optimism asserts “uncertainty could be a superpower. It could even be a love story, if you looked at it from the right angle.”

All-too-relevant for a world coming out of quarantine and into the Anthropocene, Life Among the Terranauts is essential reading for the twenty-first century.

Little, Brown & Company.

—Review by D.C. Eichelberger