I MADE A PLACE FOR YOU

A poet offers reflections on death in this debut collection.

The speaker in White’s slim, succinct poetry chapbook has death on his mind. In fact, based on the first poem, “Post Mortem,” he may already be dead. But death does not have finality here; instead, the author argues in verse, the afterlife grants people new opportunities to consider their desires and pasts. The poems are short, at times just a couple phrases long, and many have a hyperbolic quality that deftly evokes a sermon. Some lack subtlety, using biblical language to reflect on God (“God’s Typewriter”), judgment (“Purgatory”), the Crucifixion (“A Sinner’s Plea”), and Eden (“Devil Bait”). The first half is undeniably grim, with allusions to suicide, abuse, and guilt over mortal misdeeds. But White relents to a more hopeful attitude toward the end, affirming that human life is meant to be joyous: “Are we soot? / Impure, black, and / better suited for / sadness. / Quite the contrary /… / We are soil. / Basal, vital, and / better suited for / sunshine.” The poems with less explicit Christian imagery pose more accessible and poignant questions about what people deserve out of life and how they process its end. But those explicitly tied to a Christian perspective of death and heaven can feel ham-fisted. Interspersed through these poems are Orazzini’s illustrations, most of which depict a small figure with a long beak wearing a blue cape and yellow crown traipsing through abstract landscapes. In one, he sits atop a microphone with a pierced tongue curled around it; in another, he slouches on the porch of a dilapidated cabin with orbiting planets in the sky that bear facial features. The images marry the whimsical and the macabre with elements of both Dalí and The Little Prince. While the drawings aren’t explicitly religious, they convey a journey through the unknown and the indescribable—much like people depict death. By the book’s finale, it’s hard to draw a conclusion about how the speaker feels about the end of his life other than, regardless of how he’s judged by God, he knows death is inevitable: “Heaven’s doors / open serendipitously / Ushered by God’s / palm itself / Our journey is / the price of admission.”

A dark, intriguing, but uneven rumination on how people’s choices and experiences influence the afterlife.