Steve Kistulentz has been my professor of creative writing at Millsaps College and advisor in many capacities. I am delighted to share my thoughts on his hot-off-the-press new book of poetry, Little Black Daydream. Since beginning work in the bookstore, I all too frequently find books that sound interesting, but do not impart enough new information or meet a level of artistic integrity that qualify the long form and price tag of the book. Everything I blog about meets my personal standards for what should constitute a “book,” is really great, and my brilliant teacher’s newest work is no exception.
I can’t remember a time when I read something with a title so true to the spirit of this book. The interior of a person who has lived vastly and quickly gets unwound and shivers before us as we read Kistulentz’s poems. Like an unwinding ball of yarn, colors fade in and out, pale guilt and dark mourning, frosty inspiration distilled as a walk through streets, and the warm and delightful song of a child “eating, then asking for more.”
Prose readers, don’t dismiss this poetry. The forms are minimal; they instruct the meaning of the poems without being scary or overly academic. And the voice is responsibly concise, too. The book is full of wonderful phrases like “the blundering sax” and the title “Poem That Wishes It Could Touch Your Face.”
This is one of my personal favorites:
The Bungalow Club
For the holiday, imagine my hands scraping away the dead glaze
of fifty-year-old windows, prying up the loose floorboards still marked
by the rings of a brass bed where no one slept. In return I will think
of you peeling cucumbers in the exact manner of my grandmother,
making a fame of it, as the long shoelaces of kelp-green skin
flutter to the bottom of the sink, leaving your whole kitchen
smelling astringent and clean. Once you are finished, the day
will give way to the temptations of gin and a dreamless sleep
I wish I could invade, if only because it’s too much to think
of us in the same kitchen, the coordinated dance of cooking,
our fingers pressing greasy delights, filling each other’s mouths.
It turns out that to want what I want is almost a requirement,
that middle age means learning how I once was Shiva,
all these houses I destroyed and rebuilt, a farmhouse, a condo,
now a bungalow. The foundation lists to starboard, and the sound
of home is the clatter of paws against oak and the chance
to read a new poem each night before bed, a dream I thought
as transient as the steam rising from a plate of child’s pasta
in three varieties, elbows, curls, and stars. It turns out I was wrong
about all these things. I did not even know what music meant,
that song was my daughter eating, then asking for more.
All the poems, whatever they are about, carry the same sacredness with which this poem describes the quiet and beautiful and tiny world of a family and somehow connects it with “how I once was Shiva.” The same voice tells us about the failings of a mythological political structure, about longing for a lover, about the bitterness of a luckless generation, and about the redemption of a child’s plate of pasta.
These poems are personal and exploratory and reflective, but they are also vivid. Poems take place in landscapes like the waiting room at the Bureau of Metropolitan Longing, a place where there are, unsurprisingly, lots of “homeless.” The first poem gives us the private life of the narrator in the bedroom of his childhood, and we are gracefully transported from safety to the terrifying Bureau, among other places. Hyperreal landscapes constantly borrow from contemporary American reality, challenging the reader about how unrealistic and unrelated are these sometimes scary and sad faraway unrealities from our daily lives.
There are certain things that are so true to the human experience that they can only be articulated in an unreal landscape—a landscape of hyperterror, hyperhonesty, and hypertight hand-holding. It is reminiscent of the days following the loss of a friend, when the everydayness means nothing and the meaning of human relationships is all that makes sense. Each poem in this book accomplishes this on its own, and the book as a whole does the work of a novel in its characterizing of a person’s trek through days weighted by human longing.
The work of a poet is to flip the awareness switch regularly. To tap into collective truths and report back to us. We have all read poems that seem to do their work, but don’t reach us in their reporting of the human news. But the poems in Little Black Daydream really reach us. They are modern; they are sad and delightful; they are triumphant in each small mission to share something important.
Death Is a Hysterical Dynasty
Tonight we shall read from my personal book of lamentations,
sit shiva in a room lit with those overly perfumed candles as thick
as the aluminum bat I used just last week to flip away the possum
caracass I’d found collapsed against the house. Forensics tells us
the backyard is Panama before quinine, an ecosystem
unto itself, civil war of mongoose, snake, and cat. The cause
of the possum’s death was obvious, this near-biblical dryness
that lasted the summer. This morning I found a carapace,
a palmetto bug in my shower, dead in his search for water.
He got flushed, a Viking funeral; minutes later I heard about
Rocky, 48, complications from a ruptured aortic aneurysm,
who went the same week as John, 47, though by less violent means.
I’d never introduced either to my family, and now I am covering
the mirrors. Pictures from a decade ago exist without context,
the bars in them closed, marriages shattered on the pebbly coast
of installment debt, bands broken up by midnight arguments
dead men can’t recall. Forgive us out trespasses, yes, but also
this literalism. Let us frame the only surviving picture of the three
of us in a rectangle of thorns before we take communion
out in the street. I will let those candles burn, burn, burn,
burn, burn to the wick. Barracuda, then tell you how
I would have laid down my life for either of those two men,
and I have nothing to offer now they have done that for me.
There will be a signing and reading at 5:00 & 5:30 on this Tuesday, October 23 at Lemuria. Kistulentz is also the author of The Luckless Age, Red Hen Press, $16.95.
Little Black Daydream, University of Akron Press, $14.95
by Whitney
The summer of 1973 after I graduated from Forest Hill, five friends came down from Senatobia and Memphis for a long weekend visit. Among the things on their to-do list was a visit to Miss Eudora Welty. She wouldn’t be hard to find — we might run into her at the Jitney Jungle 14, but that didn’t seem sure enough to count on. Besides, she had lived in the same house forever and was listed in the phone book just like everyone else in Jackson. So it wasn’t long before the six of us were on her front porch, knocking on the door.
