H_NGM_N BKS

105 pages, $14.95

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

Nick Sturm’s full-length poetry collection How We Light is an interesting foray into the mechanics of grief. At its heart, the majority of the poems concern a failed love affair. They ask questions of how and why we communicate even when that communication fails.  While there are other minor themes replete throughout the volume, none of them surmount the near constant repetition of mouths, lips, faces, throats, and voices united in their inability to do what they were designed for. Referenced in almost every poem, they point to what becomes fetishism over loss, a sort of leitmotif for giving grief language.

For example, in “A WHORL THAT ASCENDS,” Sturm writes, “At the exhibit I touch / everything with my mouth   My mouth / does not attract much attention.” While not directly about loss, we get the sense that this mouth has still failed to communicate what it needs to. It speaks through tactile sensation, and no one pays attention to what it is speaking. Similarly, in one of the many poems that share the title “WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!”  Sturm writes, “[T]ell me you love me / is what I want to say but my tongue is not so evolved / My tongue rides a hobbyhorse in a big wet parlor / It acts like a baby.” Other iterations under that same title continually push the theme: “I am a mammal lucky to have a mouth,” one states. “I wake up and muzzle my soul . . . / My mouth automatically dismantles,” states another. This use of mouths united in their inability to do what they are designed for creates a level of hopelessness around the potential for genuine communication. This repetition also seems to say that those who can communicate the least effectively may obsess about it the most. (Though there is no loss of effective communication to the reader even when communicating about how one is unable to.) Continue reading →