Revealing Catastrophes

Abstract

Revealing Catastrophes Marc Jampole (bio) Walking Away from Explosions in Slow Motion Gregory Crosby The Operating System Community Print www.theoperatingsystem.org 144 pages; Print, $18.00 There is something provocative or interesting about most of the poems in the first section of Gregory Crosby's Walking Away from Explosions in Slow Motion. The poems sparkle with clever images that jolt the reader into taking a new look at both the quotidian and the eternal. There are gems throughout the book, but the further into the eighty-eight poems one reads, the fewer of them have the edginess or verve that characterize the thirty odd poems of the first section. In an interview with Crosby printed at the end of the volume we learn that the poet wrote all the poems in Walking Away in the year leading up to the presidential election of 2016 and the months afterwards as part of group project that Crosby describes as a contemporary form of coterie writing, which begs a question. Are the poems presented in the order in which they were written, as part of a rules-based post-modern project? Documenting how an educated and free mind reacts in real time to the growing horror of Trumpism certainly makes for an interesting way to structure a book. In the case of Walking Away, though, it would suggest that Crosby's creative powers flagged in the face of the reality of the Trump candidacy and election by the Electoral College. The book becomes a witness to walking away from an explosion of the body politic that happened in slow motion. The other possibility is that, like many poets, Crosby decided to put his stronger work first. The central and really only weakness in the book is that there seems to be no rhyme or reason for the order of the poems into three sections or within the three sections and thus no reason for the weaker material. But Crosby remains coy about the structure of the book in the interview, as he does about many things, such as the role of poetry and the poet in contemporary society. There are few overt references to politics in the poems, but many nods to pop culture and literature. In fact, without the interview at the back, most readers would not even perceive the connections to the election, only to the malaise of the current zeitgeist. Crosby's best poems favor conceits, which are extended metaphors that dominate or shape the flow of a poem. For example, in "Lonely Starbuck Lovers," Crosby creates an extended metaphor for the confusion of reality and illusion based on a popular social media misquote of a Taylor Swift song. The conceit in "Mid-Life" imagines a new translation of Dante's Inferno as a metaphor for middle age, which the poet underscores by using the first line of Dante's original Italian, "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita…" ("In the middle of the road of our life…") as the epigraph. In "Netflix and Chill," Crosby compares the end of a Netflix series to the seasons of the year. The course of a human life becomes an airplane in flight in "Wing, Prayer." Another notable feature of Crosby's poetics is the clever rendering of idiomatic expressions and homilies which jolt the reader into taking another, closer look at what the phrase means in the context of the poem. He breathes new life into old expressions in a number of ways. "Better get out of sundown before town" reverses two words. "You say that love is a battlefield and have the choreography to prove it" and "I kept it together by falling apart" twist the original metaphor into a new direction. "We aren't all in the same boat…" negates a common phrase of politicians and humanitarians. "The wagons are circling the drain" combines two idiomatic expressions. "There's a sucker worn every minute" is a straight pun. "The heart attacks what the heart hearts" adds a surrealistic element by equating desire with aggression. In his best work, Crosby holds together his extended metaphors and clever subversions of idiomatic language with a conversational rhythm...