REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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There are rare poetry collections that make me feel like the beat aesthetic never went away but instead crawled into a corner in a dark bar and somehow refined itself into something new, something as spiritual and strange as the original incarnation but shorter, sharper, and tied to contemporary America in ways that cut to the heart of what the country is and has suffered. Noah C. Lekas’s Saturday Night Sage is one of those collections, and that becomes obvious from the start:

“I awoke to a bar tab

& prayer beads,

I believe, I believe,

I’ve been redeemed!

“Bodhi!” I cried,

in the slums

of the shadow factory.

“Brahmajyoti.” I prophesied,

into a broken toilet

on Main St.

on Mayday in Milwaukee

rejoicing with devotees,

on the 4th of July in Brooklyn

drinking Jameson with karmis.”

As the title implies, this is a collection about the good, the bad, the ugly, and the spiritual that can be found “in the bowels of Saturday night.” This is a book about booze and hobos, smoky bars and drug dealers, mythology and cigarettes, jazz and the blues. Lekas is a chronicler of urban nights, and he perfectly nails the atmosphere that usually accompanies the themes, places, and people he writes about.  

The beauty of Saturday Night Sage is that it feels fresh, not like a Tom Waits/Charles Bukowski pastiche, which is often the case with poetry that deals with the drunk, the broken, the downtrodden. The voice here often sounds like a song, a dark blues you can easily imagine coming from a stage that holds only one person, a chair, a guitar, and a microphone. Lekas understands how rhythm affects the way a poem is read, and he uses both language, line cutes, and space on the page to dictate a variety of rhythms that make his lines hit harder.

Saturday Night Sage occupies an interstitial space between a place we’ve all been in—a place where we dread and crave the end of the night—and a space in which we can openly discuss the darkness at the core of Americana, the sadness of drunken souls stumbling through the night in search of something they can’t remember or trying to run away from something that’s inside them. There are no throwaway poems here, but of the crowning jewels of the collection is “Midwestern,” which is beautiful in its gritty reality and speaks of a seemingly irreversible process that has affected many cities across the country: 

“The Wisconsin of my youth was stranded
somewhere between the collapse
of the industrial revolution
& the crack epidemic.
The Wisconsin of my adulthood is lost
somewhere between the promise of restoration
& the stoic acceptance of absolute abandonment.
I, like most of the men in my family
punched a cold steel time clock
& I swept floors
cleared dishes
cleaned cars
emptied trashcans
painted houses
demolished bathrooms

installed cabinets
remodeled kitchens
built crates
& repaired instruments.

I watched the disintegration
of a hard blue American backbone
& the rising tide of an industry-less land,
industriously destitute
the streets of my hometown
are lined with empty buildings.
The malls offer absurd free rent signing deals
to new retailers
& the factories just buckle
under the weight of it all.”

Saturday Night Sage is short and powerful. It’s the literary equivalent of a thick cloud of smoke rising through stale air in front of a neon sign. Lekas has experienced Saturday night, has spoken to those who make it their home, and he takes readers into that world with ease. You should grab a drink and join him.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.