Crow Logos

Appalachian literature and surrealism might seem strange bedfellows. Though there are obvious crosspollinations, the anarchic energies and tradition-flouting tendencies of the Surrealist movement are not, on the face of it, a hand-in-glove fit for mainstream Appalachian literature. Derelict Days in That Derelict Town, Knoxvillian Alan May’s fourth full-length collection, beautifully frustrates this train of thought.

Responding to an interviewer’s query about the hallucinatory quality of his work, Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez — a founding figure in magical realism — offered pushback: “There’s not a single line that does not have basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.” I suspect that Alan May would have something similar to say about Appalachia. For May, a surrealist perspective is simply what’s required to decode and digest the high strangeness of the 21st century Mountain South, in much the same way a gothic perspective was necessary to unpack the 20th.

The act of seeing surreally also allays boredom. In “A Walk in the Park,” a souped-up imagination allows May’s speaker to transform a stroll along a greenway into a timeless frontier parable about man’s endurance against the elements. Here is how the speaker describes his shortcut through a tidy hedgerow: “you imagine a great battle you kick / you punch you gouge with your fingers / like a snake striking a strike snaking its way / around an impenetrable shield.” But, ever the ironist, May’s Walter Mitty-lite aggrandizements pave the way for genuine epiphany. In the midst of this empty mythmaking, our speaker is suddenly and acutely debilitated by his humanness. Beset by a raft of hardships — “a migraine develops you feel / a crook around your neck / you limp hobbled by it all” — he stumbles upon a littered crutch and is overtaken with a tongue-tying cocktail of hope and despair: “I too little crutch am lonely / where is the lovely child / running through the forest where is he / who is miraculously healed?” Given that this poem is the collection’s kickoff, I choose to index it as a mission statement-in-miniature. Here, May proposes that his outré outlook is not escapist, preening, or needlessly cloudy, but a method of heightening the ho-hum — of revivifying all that is rundown and glanced over.

Civic fracture and infrastructural neglect are just the status quo in Derelict Days. The social contract has collapsed. The institutional safeguards have crumbled; the administrators and peacekeepers have gone AWOL. In “Dandelion Blues,” we see a “county clerk / in the park, flying her kite,” blissfully unaware of the wall-to-wall mayhem. “Dearest Susan” is a dreamlike vignette that opens with a newspaper-reading hare setting off an increasingly calamitous chain of events: “The county mayor, / an entrepreneur / a former wrestler, / unfolds from his car” and, as our narrator brusquely undersells it, “hijinks ensue.”

Surrounded by kakistocracy, May even has the gall to slip us a cheeky critique of the Prussian schooling model in “Bon Voyage”: “In one narrow alleyway / two teachers are sawing a little girl in half / so they can put her back together again.” But nowhere is the systemic rot more apparent than “Everyday Monster,” which confirms our mounting hunch that “for each street on this grid / some minor disaster awaits,” and shows us exactly how this cycle of homegrown hate and hair-trigger mistrust is perpetuated from womb to tomb: “in each toy house / hangs a loaded AR-15.”

The lyric “I” that guides (better yet, misguides) the reader through Derelict Days is not spared these ransackings. To the contrary, he is only ever a step or two removed from the next Kafkaesque pratfall. May’s speakers have a good bit in common with Beau Wassermann, the star-crossed lead from Ari Aster’s 2023 tragicomedy, Beau Is Afraid. Like Beau, they too appear victims of an otherworldly jinx. Their bad luck knows few bounds, rubs elbows with the absurd. Regardless of how clearheaded or conventional a poem seems, this ill will is ready and raring to destabilize best laid plans. But, to their credit, May’s speakers have made a shaky peace with pariahdom. Shrugging, the narrator of “Strathmartine” announces to no one in particular, “I was running late for my meeting / with the town mob.”

For all the gilded weirdness, for all the delicious decrepitude, the aspect of Derelict Days with the most staying power may well be its treatment of human loneliness. From the palmprints on Lascaux cave walls to the Facebook “poke” button, we crave intimacy and touch at a foundational level and have done so since time immemorial. May takes his readership on a withering safari through the disfigured soulscapes and Freudian minefields that result when this yearn goes unnourished. “[A lonely boy with a pellet gun shoots the sky]” alerts us to the possibility that the young speaker’s astral questing is merely a survival strategy in the absence of proper socialization, and the collection’s title poem, wherein the speaker fabricates a friend group out of thin air, outs this as a near certainty: “I’m smoking / with the boys outside the pool hall. Who / am I kidding? I’m all alone, watching / the deer lick the shop windows.” “The Boy and the Monster” — one of three multipart poetic interludes in the book — is, however, the crowning exemplar of May’s fluency in the affairs of the lovelorn.

Derelict Days leaves us with a lot to enthuse about. But, in rare moments, it can go a smidge overboard on the melancholia. Throughout the back half of the final section, I had trouble shaking the feeling that all the piquant, playful rhetoric was mostly putting lipstick on a doctrinaire cynicism — which made the hopeful chord the collection lands on all the more refreshing, all the more resonant. “Crow,” the capstone poem, locates a Sisyphean courage in the stick-to-itiveness of the carrion bird. (Appropriately, the book’s cover image is the silhouette of a crow on its perch, looking pensive.) Wing-shot by a surly farmer, the titular crow must teach itself to fly again in a hayloft, and in this halting, uphill process, May finds a blueprint for staying alive — if not living well — in an age of catastrophe: “The bird / leapt from the loft and landed / hard on the ground. It picked / itself up, shook / the dust from its feathers / and slowly limped away.”