A MARVELOUS MOMENTUM

Kiskadee leans into narrative in this debut poetry collection.

This assemblage of verses sometimes reads like an updated collection of Aesop’s fables. An owl befriends a scared bear stuck at the top of a tree; a spider makes its web on the strings of an old violin; a wild turtle learns karate from watching the television show Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on a family’s portable TV—the 400-page volume is filled with such stories in verse. Many are almost novelistic, with named characters playing out dramas of connection and disconnection: A younger woman befriends the nonagenarian she shares a room with in a hospital; a man experiencing a rough acclimation to a new city finds support in his newly long-distance relationship; a couple meet on a cross-country bus and form a yoga studio together, but when they discover they can’t have children, the wife develops an eating disorder. Even the smaller moments that dot these poems are rich with character, conflict, and backstory, as when a girl discovers a frog in her backyard and is disturbed to find he isn’t moving or breathing: “Her vast five years of / owning / goldfish has taught her that the / absence / of these things add up to the poor / frog // being dead.” It’s rare to read a poem, let alone several dozens of them, that leaps so readily across time and space. Entire lifetimes can pass in the space of a stanza, as in “Bonfire”: “Ryan is not 5, 16, 20, Ryan is now 60 / and there are places on his skin that / is lighter than it should be. There / are places in his skeleton that / should be more / complete.”

The volume is divided into two books, each with its own title and table of contents: Then Again and And Now This. The division may be lost on most readers, however, as the two books are largely indistinguishable in style and form. There’s a Whitmanesque maximalism to Kiskadee’s verses, which sometimes stretch on for pages at a time. Sometimes, the poet’s figurative powers are on full display, as in “City Bus. Red Eye,” in which a woman notices how “The fluorescent bulbs hum like insane / angels / over / her head.” More often, however, the writing is functional and prose-like, chopped into lines with minimal apparent rhyme or reason. This isn’t to say the narratives they contain are not compelling; Kiskadee has a great sense for small human moments that are simultaneously affecting and surreal, as when the woman on that same city bus watches as “a stranger switches sides of the bus / to be next to another stranger” and the two strangers begin to hold hands. The poet isn’t afraid to risk sentimentality, which sometimes leads to slightly cringeworthy moments, as in the haiku “Rewind”: “War in reverse. Hushed / bombs rise skywards as debris / grows back into home.” Most of the time, however, the poems strike a note that feels, if not fully revelatory, then at least comforting in a way that many readers will enjoy.

A sometimes striking, always sincere collection of narrative poems.