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shimmer's review
4.0
I'd read all three of the chapbooks collected here before, but rereading them together made the text fresh. Each chapbook on its own enmeshed individual lives and moments in history and landscapes, and that's even more powerful here because the scope of time is extended. But I was also struck by the "reverse" narrative as the narrator heads east from California to Nevada to Atlanta, undoing manifest destiny as he leaves behind the wild west (and wild youth) for a slower, more settled life. Prose. Poems is a catalogue of decisions and of consequences met and avoided -- to have another drink or not, to intervene in a fight or let it go on, to drive down the far side of a mountain in a snowstorm or head back to town -- and the implication is that all of history, and all of progress, is equally dependent on those minor moments that may not seem like much at the time. While the present narrator is only suggested throughout the book rather than clearly established, there's a strong sense of looking back on life wondering how he arrived at what seems to be a stable position. There are also some really stirring echoes to remind us that nothing's so simple -- the recurrence of the Donner Party in the western sections, and the complicated racial history of Georgia and the South throwing even his "quiet" new life into darker relief. All of that's reflected in the prose, too, especially as the narrator actively, immediately revises what he's said even while saying -- replacing one description with another in the course of a few sentences, or starting a story with one point in mind only to decide on the page that it turns out to mean something else. So while there were a few points at which the stories of drinking, drugs, etc. became repetitive in a way they didn't reading one chapbook at a time, even the "banality" (perhaps too strong a word) of that repetition furthered the sense of every moment, and every word included or left out, mattering more than it seems at first glance.
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