SECONDARY WORLDS

Religious fanaticism, dark nights of the soul, vacuous business philosophy, and childhood reveries are limned in these sometimes luminous, sometimes cantankerous poems.

Gedaliah explores the “secondary worlds” that we build to substitute the real one, whether through memory, technology, ideology, or insanity. Many spotlight scenes in his native San Francisco, where “mad street poets of Haight-Ashbury” voice “laments and howling / at others not there…The rawness of / failed lives whose / unreality more real / than we could bare.” In a suite of vehement political poems, the author imagines a Christian fundamentalist for whom “Life is nothing but reward / for those of faith, / and punishment / for those who dare stray,” and decries resurgent antisemitism since “The slaughter of October 7th / became the tinnitus of dread.” He also serves up raucous riffs on managers who “babble the lexicon / of pseudoscientific drivel, / that only an obtuse / HR department could / gleefully design” and the indignities of modern culture: “No rant should end / without a shout-out to those, / who compulsively post / every restaurant meal. / It’s just food you F***’s!” Gedaliah is a compelling poet of the psyche, probing the fragmented nature of consciousness and its riot of conflicting impulses and evasions. His limpid verse conveys a world of emotion and character through plainspoken, evocative, subtly composed details, as in the portrait of familial estrangement in “Sketch of My Father”: “After dinner he sits outside / in the dark. / Away from the family bustle. / Huddled over his dessert, / he eats alone / in silence.” The richest of Gedaliah’s secondary worlds, as in the haunting “Awake at 4 AM,” emerge in memories and dreams that imbue a lost reality with enigmatic meaning: “Once my beloved / grandmother’s ghost / visited me. / Her sad face framed in / evening light. / Her hazel eyes. / The softness of regret / in the words / she kept repeating: / I’m so sorry! / I’m so sorry!/ And over the years, / I still can’t fathom why.”

A captivating collection that combines a prickly social conscience with deep feeling.