The sinister shadow of the late capitalist war machine falls on everything in Elly Bookman's debut collection, Love Sick Century. In the unforgettable early poem, "Privilege," the speaker sunbathes at a public pool beneath a sky filled with the "small whitenesses" of fighter jets rehearsing combat, and wryly notes: "I lie back in my chair [] and try to become browner." The irony is as casual as it is scalding, and from this atmosphere of discomfiting malaise the poem accelerates into something more bleak:
In this sky, planes fly
low and heavy, back and
forth from the base,
practicing war. I'm afraid
I'm finally all right
knowing good things
in me have died.
Is this cynicism? Perhaps. These are poems of airstrikes and warships, active shooter drills and students' "shadowy backpacks." (The poet is a teacher). Even in a poem titled "Threatless," when a male lover's hand cradles the back of the speaker's neck, something ominous menaces. But if the tone is one of cynicism, it's not the snide indifference or stony skepticism of the coarsened realist. Rather, it's the sort born of profound tenderness, and one that breeds tenderness in turn through its unfailing eye for beauty, mercy, and wonder, in spite of what it's learned about the world.
In the poem "Vivarium," with all the earnestness of John Cusack's boombox serenade in Say Anything, the speaker plays a thunderstorm soundtrack to a pair of pet frogs, hoping to spur them to mate. In the poem "Clamor," amidst the bombardment of television war news, the speaker recalls a single perfect soap bubble hovering behind the back of a former lover as he washes the dishes. And in "Nocturne," the same hypervigilance that scrutinizes the lights on the home security system panel remembers too that "somewhere, someone's job/ is to place tiny bulbs inside/ plastic bodies, that/ someone else's is to decide/ that firefly color." Indeed, inside the desolate ennui of these pages, fireflies nonetheless still shimmer their plaintive SOS: "here am I./ Here am I." The best of these poems deftly captures a seething disquiet with a mastery I've not encountered since Arda Collins' virtuosic debut, It Is Daylight. Love Sick Century is both distress signal and emergency response; rest assured, help is on the way, if only these poems can find you.
