The author of these lines, Brian Brodeur, has an uncanny eye for the telling—damning— detail. The descriptive passages in his first book, Other Latitudes, are at times brutal and unvarnished, at times highly nuanced, yoking together disparate images to achieve an intricate layering of meaning. In the example above, for example, a wound sutured up with black nylon thread can certainly evoke an image of a caterpillar—but not the pretty ones destined to become monarch butterflies. No, this is more of a gypsy moth caterpillar, ugly and destructive, decimating its host. The reaction is revulsion, animosity—appropriate for someone visiting the hospital bed of a crash victim.

And there is a lot of violence in these poems—violence against others, violence against the self. A lot of pain, and wounds that resist healing. In “Pendolino,” for example, a group of young travelers on a transalpine train share second-hand horror stories about grim acts of war, including the tale of a Viet Nam soldier who methodically and psychotically stalks VCs and knifes them in the back. The travelers chase their stories with shots of peach schnapps, a sickly sweet liqueur, as though simply telling their stories left a bitter taste in their mouths that had to be immediately gargled out. They try to stay awake, “as if the night could not go on without us.” The night, here can perhaps be seen as the grander metaphor for the ongoing and unflattering history of the humankind. In “To a Young Woman in a Hospital Bed,” the speaker recounts the progression of a “cutter,” a person driven to acts of self immolation. The poem ends by revealing the underlying cause and motivation—the scars inflicted by (presumably) her stepfather. The word “To” in the title is intriguing to me—on the one hand, it evokes the classical ode, an attempt to honor and memorialize its subject. It also implies a gift, as though the poet were somehow trying to make amends, or to ameliorate the girl’s suffering through an act of communion. In either case, an unusual poetic choice. There are suicides, absences, car crashes. I love these lines from “Convicted Felon”:

Sure, there’s the realist imagery, the vividly rendered sights and sounds, but also, the realization (not new, of course) that it’s when we’re closest to death that we consider ourselves most alive. Perhaps that’s also why there’s a good deal of sex in this collection—something that (hetero) male poets typically shy away from (perhaps its simply too hard for men to speak poetically about sex without coming across as sexist? Or smug?). Of course, as with many of the relationships and people portrayed in this collection, the sex is at times dysfunctional (maybe that’s not the best word), as in the central suite of poems, which describes a painter and his unconsummated desire for his model. Even the tale of the Viet Nam soldier, described earlier, takes on a sexual overtone, with the soldier whispering in his victim’s ear as he drives his knife to its heart-stopping climax.

Formally, the poems in Other Latitudes look and act like poems—not necessarily through rhyme, but certainly through meter, rhythm, and lineation. A few venture into the realm of the prose poem (though these, for me, are the least engaging).

Brodeur’s second collection, Natural Causes, recently won the Autumn House book competition, and will be published in the coming year. I read an early draft, and can recommend it without caveat. Brodeur also runs a blog that is well known to many poets, “How a Poem Happens.” It’s also well worth checking out.