ANY DUMB ANIMAL

Words echo across a lifetime in Hines’ debut poetry collection.

A strength and a weakness of poetry is that it must always come after the experience it describes. Hines gives voice to the effects of this delay in “Language Immersion,” which details his spotty acquisition of Spanish, an old lover’s native language: “Strange, / how words now don’t seem so important / when in another life I lived with a man / for whom they were everything.” Other works in the collection deal with the sensation of words coming too late, as in the opener, “Phone Call,” in which the inebriated speaker calls his homophobic father from college to reveal that he’s gay. Another poem about a father provides the collection with its title; in it, a man decides to force his son to learn to swim, dragging him across a pier and telling him that “any dumb animal / can learn.” Father images effectively recur in references to violent or domineering lovers and even the speaker himself: “This morning, yelling at my son, the sound / of my own father rattles from my throat / and sends me reeling into the bathroom / where I stare several minutes at the mirror.” Such poems of difficult relationships sit beside others about love and foiled plans, such as the tragicomic “Like Icarus,” in which a young couple’s inaugural dinner is upended by an accidental fire. Hines’ verses are accessible, and he isn’t afraid to employ sly rhymes here and there, but he also offers unexpected images or revelations. Standouts include “Something Old, Something New,” “Give Me a Dog Named Outrage,” and “Gay Divorce”—the latter of which begins, wonderfully, with, “Only our socks served two masters. Resting / in their disarrayed drawer, our feet close enough / in size that laziness, the law of community property / reigned.” Overall, it’s an often masterful collection about how people are shaped by outside forces and about the importance of finding the right way to say something—even after years have passed.

A cohesive and insightful set of narrative poems.