TELL ME HOW YOU ARE

Pittman takes a deep dive into personal relationships in this book of poems.

Human connection, memory, and longing take centerstage in this poetry collection based on the author’s past relationships. In the opening poem, “The Battle of Chattanooga,” Pittman compares leaving a loved one to a Civil War battle: He longs to be a wounded soldier in the excitement of battle rather than experience the more banal psychological wounds from the mundane breakup he’s currently experiencing. “Memphis” features a woman who dreamed of the titular city and contemplates how it “will reach out its warm southern hand / and take her in, / opening its doors to all its secret places” (but she never makes it there). The poet has a penchant for articulating deceptively simple observations about random encounters in nature: in one example, the discovery of a dead bird jostles a memory, prompting the speaker to “sing to it my simple song, / its chorus about your uncertain smile, / its refrain the music of your laughter, / each note like the sound of a choir, almost murmuring, / deep, deep in my heart.” Or in “What I Cannot Forget” the speaker ambitiously associates a woman’s physique with the beauty of the natural world: “Your shoulders are the hills of some unnamable country, / covered by an early snow, / lit by the light of exploding stars.” Pittman, in the titular poem, writes movingly about the longing to forge connections by any means necessary: “We could talk as the cars thin out / on the broken avenues. / And you don’t even have to speak. / Just keep looking at me as the moment passes, / And all the moments that come after.” The verse here is consistently visceral and evocative, and Pittman conveys longing in a familiar but elegant way. However, his poems inspired by Freud, Kierkegaard, archeology, and paleontology can seem overintellectualized and may be difficult for some readers to plow through.

Sometimes overambitious but consistenly stirring collection that finds novel ways to explore memory, lust, and loss.