Stephen F. Austin State University Press

118 pages, $16

Review by Eliza Rotterman

Stephen Massimilla’s new poetry collection The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat begins seaside with the desire “not quite to live forever” but “to take / my fill of you, a long, lascivious look.” It’s an apt start for a book inspired by myth, history and journey. “Teach me to keep going / nowhere,” pleads Massimilla, “nowhere” describing both place—rock and sky—and an enlightened state of mind. From terrain nearly vacant of human presence to Italian cities densely populated and teetering atop towers of myth, the cyclical, Buddhist kind of travel Massimilla speaks of is always on a spiritual plane even while his language reflects a hyper-real, playful sensibility: “Urethra of porcelain teapot hisses,” and teens in “their went-thither hips in zucchini-green denim” traipse by.

Our expectations of travel are often unrealistic. We demand transformation without accepting the terms of pilgrimage. Adrift in his “hull-shaped hat,” the speaker of Massimilla’s poems searches for authentic, unfoldable experience. And at times he seems to find it—in his continued effort to see himself as part of a collective searching for homecoming.  “I mean more than consuming,” he tells us in “Etymology”;  “I stand wanting.” Remarkably, Massimilla brings loss and disappointment into haptic resolve:

The warmth replaced
with loss becomes part of every other reality,

its appreciation, alive to the touch,
touched every which way, every way.    Continue reading →