Love Sick Century
by Elly Bookman
42 Miles Press. Softcover, $15, 86 pages
I confess that when I’m reading poetry, I focus on collections or the occasional anthology, not spending nearly enough time with literary magazines and journals. I’d like to say it’s because I prefer work in a finished state, after it’s proven itself and perhaps stood up to some of the weathering of time. Or perhaps, this habit is because I enjoy poems in communication with one-another, something that seems most-consistent within a full collection. The truth is also probably the staggering number of journals and the sad fact that many literary publications don’t survive their first decade. Excuses aside, I don’t spend nearly-enough time reading the journals that pave the way to great collections. This blind spot means that I’m often years late when a poet emerges from their composer’s cave into the daylight of a first collection. Fortunately, today I get to be an exception as I hold Elly Bookman’s 2024 full-length debut Love Sick Century. Across three attentive sections, Love Sick Century contends with the tension that exists between living one’s day-to-day life—for most neither glamourous nor tragic—while recognizing the fragility of the world on national, international, and personal scales. Within these pages, the speaker’s quiet, grounded awareness of her surroundings leads to a captivating interplay of light and darkness in imagery, in thought, and in knowledge—what may or may not be perceived or understood. Beyond the speaker’s unvarnished honesty toward the world at-hand, the language feels—if not sparing—selected for its necessity and paired with a subtle control of sentence and line. As a result, these accessible free verse lyrics tap into vital experiences that are commonly filed away as insignificant, ordinary. Instead of being plebeian, these poems watch and move—as if there is no other satisfactory way but forward, living—through uncertainty and its disconcerting shadows.
I need to make an effort when writing about Love Sick Century to not avoid words like “mundane” or “ordinary,” but to give them context so that I may avoid having them appear to be a belittlement of this collection’s true strength. None of the words addressing the commonplace describe the experience of reading the book. No, if I were describing the feeling of reading these poems, I would suggest that an invisible hand has drawn a ribbon from beneath your ribs and has pulled it gently, stretching it in a way that is not painful or unpleasant, but has a curious tug that reminds you to pause, consider how and when you are breathing in the moment and space and time you have consumed the poems, a feeling that persists after the book has been closed. Sorry, let’s reset. When I mention the subject matter or content of some of these poems as ordinary or mundane what I mean is that they’re not grandiose in the sense of having exotic narrative details or fits of melodrama or highly-traditional or experimental forms. You may share many experiences with the speaker of Love Sick Century. In fact, it’s arguable that this collection lacks a lot of the gimmicks that can mark a collection as prestige poetry or can be angled as bait for judges tired after reading their hundredth manuscript. Instead, the material of Love Sick Century is subdued and introspective but confident despite having limited desire to dispense wisdom or instruct. No life-coaches or self-help tips here, folks, largely because wisdom and instruction are not cheap currency.
To speak to some of the everyday that characterizes the life in these pieces, the opening poems of Love Sick Century feature innocuous activities like shopping, scraping beneath the dish sink at work, or latent dreads—loneliness and unsatisfied desire or paying the bills or celestial bodies colliding with Earth. These are presented alongside minor refuges like shelves stocked with endless preferences of taste and diet or an hour spent sunbathing as planes fly overhead rehearsing for yet another distant war. The lack of lofty content presents a familiar speaker as a surrogate (as opposed to hero or protagonist or obvious literary construction) while also leaving the reader susceptible to the tonal shifts, allowing us to be taken off guard as description yields to reflection and insight. For an immediate example, the opening poem “Today” where the knowledge that “a war started” (p. 13, line 1) is undercut by the routine need for groceries. We do not know where the war is or the supposed reasons for the war. The poem employs short, carefully stacked lines—the standard measure in Bookman’s debut—that teem with delicious foods and products. Despite the sensual promise of the imagery, we don’t know what goes into her cart as if to suggest the product of shopping is less important than the process. Instead of listing her purchases like a social media influencer, she conveys feeling to us as only a poet can,
It felt like aisles and aisles
of freedom, freedom
from gluten, dairy, fat, all
the things an animal
can give, or the freedom
to have each one all at once
on a frozen pizza. It felt (p. 13, lines 12-18)
Material, raw sustenance is available, in plentitude, despite the modest means that characterize a lot of the habits of our speaker—best seen in the bittersweet indulgence offered in “Prix Fixe” (p. 28-29)—but there is a more spiritual need than physical want of pleasure or satedness. At times, it sears the language of “freedom” either from the world or to be with it, a state of being that can’t be taken to a check-out counter.
Regardless of whether the speaker is seeking this freedom by way of purchase or peace-of-mind or personal safety or human and animal companionship, the scenes and situations of the poems take great care with the lighting, whether it’s a muted atmospheric accent of LEDs in a home security system or fluorescent industrial lighting blaring overhead in a store, office, or classroom. In either case, the voice of the poems contains a dark iridescence within its observations, but one that glows more than glowers. For example, a pair of companion poems titled “Nocturne”—placed as the final poem of the first section and penultimate piece of the collection—share the opening line, “After I make my home dark,” (p. 33 & p. 79). At night and alone in her home, light (and its natural binary, the dark) is within the scope of the speaker’s control, something she can choose at the end of the day, for rest. This phenomena is, in equal measure, a miraculous and mundane feature of modern existence. The first of the two night songs continues:
I wander through the few
quiet rooms and let
the bright blinking eyes
of the continuing electricity
take me in. (p. 33, lines 2-6).
Through the wanted darkness, outside of the speaker’s will, “the alarm pad keeps its emerald / beacon of earnest defense / burning on [. . .] I’m not / vulnerable” (lines 13-16). Even in their artificial technological modernity these objects retain a human (and natural) touch to them. Our speaker is, by the “language of / its six green indicators [. . .] not untouched,” (lines 9-12) invoking a double-negative in “not untouched” that evokes her mild, wry surprise at being moved by such a non-entity. Later in the poem she reminds herself of the human means of production, down to the observation that:
somewhere someone’s job
is to place tiny bulbs inside
plastic bodies, that
someone else’s is to decide
that firefly color, and sit
at a table shining under office light
and tell me which vividness
should tell me I am kept
safe, I am kept connected [….] (lines 19-27)
These are not regal details and though the plastic and tiny bulbs and office lighting are not incandescent, they become companionable in whatever illumination, meager and intimate or blaring and public, they provide. A human hand and mind has touched them, has absorbed his own light in the process, so that the lights in the room manage to be both haunting and comforting.
These sibling poems in “Nocturne” are not isolated examples of Love Sick Century’s skill grappling with the inherently amorphous and elusive qualities of shadow and dark. “Code Red” introduces an active shooter drill at the school where the speaker teaches. After practicing the routine of locking the door and turning off the lights “[w]hile schoolchildren slip / like stolen hours into the corners / of the room” (p.24, lines 1-3) the school day stops. In the darkness of her classroom, the speaker has a moment to ruminate on her time at a bookstore where her job “was to tenderly wipe down / the covers” of art books, including a series of landscapes painted by Adolf Hitler, a man whose youthful failure as an artist feels like a dark punchline preceding his legacy of violence and destruction. While the reader knows the children are safe and the point of the drill is to make them safer in a time of unlikely crisis and the reader may understand that the book is a historical artifact or a novelty. The tenderness and care given to the object (not even the real paintings, but copies) feels dishonorable, even shameful juxtaposed the treatment of the children, which is procedural, distant and distanced:
we have followed instructions
we have done what we can.
The weather will be
what it is—several minutes
of sunshine or clouds,” (lines 8-12)
It would appear that the wellbeing of the children can be protected, but only the way in which you might wear a raincoat or bring an umbrella on a cloudy day; put on sunscreen in the summer or carry an EpiPen in case of a severe allergic reaction. Again, there’s a tension in the crassness of comparative value as the dangers insinuated are not forces of nature or signs of human handling of an artbook of questionable merit.
Elsewhere, the contrasting figures of light and dark introduce the poem “Seizure.” Before the title’s medical event, the poem begins, “I keep the light, / oceans, earth, / safe inside my / pocket” (p. 38, lines 1-4). In keeping with the medical theme, “Diagnosis” takes us to the doctor’s office where a camera slips inside the speaker’s body to allow her to look around herself from the inside (p. 66). But the most prominent display of the dark’s ability to expose or reveal some of the distances between us takes us to an emptying school in a poem simply titled “Dark” (p. 67-68) in the third section of the collection. With the inclusion of the title, “Dark” utilizes the word “dark” twenty times in a poem that is forty-one mid-length lines long as marks school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. The speaker recalls, among a litany of dark subjects, her own listlessness and feelings of indifference with her own surroundings as various darknesses tug and shove her. She sleeps through sunsets now and notices “Dark soil in the garden beds, in / the houseplants, spilled on the kitchen / floor” (lines 18-20) or turns her phone to “Dark mode” after rushing through dark thoughts that include “The dark fur of the dog so soft / I’d skin her to make myself a coat if I / didn’t love the rest of her so desperately” (lines 20-22). In our varying degrees of isolation during that time, these were the types of impossible human situations and thoughts we had to contend with, often alone, and I’m appreciative to see this collection come out now before our memories of the period scab over. At the same time, I believe this book has the vitality to outlive any houseplant or even our beloved pets.
However, as much as I appreciate these poems and their voice, tenor and perspective, I know that the speaker’s eye and diction are not the entire picture. Therefore, I’ve been forced to ponder any other major ingredients that truly make these poems powerful. With time, I better appreciate the technical dexterity that can be found in the control of these sturdily-built sentences across their respective lines. Bookman’s poems read naturally, clearly, while also guiding the reader on expeditions in individual sentences. The detail and complexity of thought, the variety of cadence, and the careful pause placement are genuinely graceful in a way that could even make them easy to overlook—as I suggested before, these are not auspicious forms as the majority of the poems are a single stanza or spread across simple-patterned groupings like couplets, in short- to middle-length lines which rarely stretch to even pentameter’s ruler—but the control is impressive and affecting. And while I could pick out just about any poem in the collection for an example to walk-through, perhaps the best place to look is at the poem “Love Sick” that ends the second, central section of the book. Some collections lose their energy after a dazzling first act and drag or sag in the middle until a grand finale. Love Sick Century maintains its strength from cover to cover and the center of this collection is the centerpiece. Closing the curtain on section two, “Love Sick” represents a showcase of syntax and overlapping of forms while proving both wildly ambitious and satisfying in its meditations on mortality, tragic poets, longing, and the ultimate value of art and poetry.
“Love Sick” is also, far-and-away, the most prominent, expansive work in the collection. The poem is composed across (rather than divided into) ten double-spaced sections that cover a stretch of nineteen pages (p. 43-61). Following a Paul Celan epigraph, the poem employs just sixteen sentences, which may not sound like anything that notable until you notice only the final section ends with the termination of a sentence while the previous nine all fight a concluding pause as its final (often only) sentence spans multiple sections in a kind of bridge. The double-spaced verses luxuriate and roil in an existential lostness in which the audience is suddenly immersed. “You” has taken the place of the speaker’s typical “I” as the reader becomes the new surrogate for the speaker. Here, it’s Bookman’s formal command—as the poem wrangles with the drowned great voices of singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley and John Berryman, famous for melancholy, or the suicidal reputation of artists or walking the dog and watching movies—is in the pull and release of the sentences as “Love Sick” builds a tidal momentum and undertow. As evidence of the gravity of this syntax, I submit the fact that only the final two sections contain more than a single sentence. Furthermore, it’s the final section that—barely more than a single page—completely rooms nine of the sixteen total sentences after opening with the tail of a tenth that it shares with the prior section. After such long sentences and thoughts, it’s a shock and a relief to encounter the two shortest sentences of the collection which simply implore us to “Rest.” (p. 60). “Love Song” is a marvel of a poem that I wish I could show you on this page, but no handful of lines will properly give the grand movement its due. “Love Sick” is orchestral in its arrangement and emotionally symphonic in its resonance notes.
The psychic lightning that courses through “Love Sick” cannot help but channel itself into the concluding section of the book where the speaker communes with the late and magical poet Larry Levis (“This Century,” p. 76-77) as well as finishing the book on the simply-titled “Poem” which breaks down and speaks to poetry itself and is able to reflect upon its necessity in her life. If you, like me, are unable to put this book down once you first finish it, upon revisiting it days or weeks later, even in the first half of the book will remember that closing surge of intensity and closure. And while you will likely recall the first impressions of those poems, upon a subsequent viewings their pulse will be even more apparent.
Ultimately, what I need to reiterate is that this is no ordinary collection, though a reader only looking at the surface of the poems will be forgiven. There are no superheroes or Shakespearian tragedies or experimental gimmicks of form or repetition. But there is a powerful, steady voice in the poems, and one that might leave an indelible mark with you. And, triumphantly, this book has found a press that has done the work justice. Slightly oversized, with generous spacing across a meticulous layout, this paperback feels fantastic and substantial in the hand. I even began to fall in love with the simple, soft curves of the uncluttered sans serif font—a style of typeface that I never expected to appreciate in a book of poetry, but which fits the personality of these poems in its commitment to only what is essential in the roundness and openness of the shapes and kerning. I salute the editors at 42 Miles Press whose care is apparent in the preservable artifact of the book, as they made a wise selection for the winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award. The fact that it took more than a year of production to see the final product in print demonstrates a patience, dedication, and attentiveness by all parties involved.
