All Our Unforeseen Lives

Ian Hall’s Creekwater Mansions

Every page of Creekwater Mansions, Ian Hall’s debut collection, takes wild swings. Humor, libido, acrobatics of imagery and diction. These poems disarm and upend assumptions. Yet they do exist in a recognizable lineage.

A native of southeastern Kentucky’s coalfields, Hall earned an M.F.A. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Evidence of this background is everywhere in Creekwater Mansions. But what does this lineage look and sound like to the figures represented in these poems?

In “Blue Yodel for Back When,” the poem’s speaker riffs on this question: “[To] me, it means throats / clearing in the goosepimple light, work trucks coming to / in pruny black cold like someone speaking / with a beastly stammer. It means thieving // your living from sourpuss ground.”

Even so, the impact of these memories sometimes looms too large: “If I fix on it for too long everything goes to Miracle // Whip between my ears. What I need is hard / kilometers between here & me.”

A large crop of characters populates the poems of this collection, and we are treated to numerous fully embodied perspectives (though the voice remains distinctively Hall’s). The speaker of “A Country Horse-Doctor” narrates a seriously unpleasant wintertime encounter he’s shared with a couple of dodgy-seeming characters and their beleaguered horse, which “just lagged there, stalactites of cold coming off its nostrils, chuffing raw cosmos.” Workers figure prominently in poems like “The Coalblacked Jacobins,” “A Day Laborer Dreams Away His Drive Home,” and “Elegy for JOANN Fabrics.”

A highly stylized iteration of this lineage propels the voice of Creekwater Mansions. “Lastward” details a first attempt to write a book about “the yearning syrup of Appalachian idiom.” This book “aimed / to atomize every hair / trigger utterance. To encompass all / the rawboned poise.” After dismissal by a critic, the poem’s speaker declares about his work’s intent, “I wanted it to give the whole / motion: the charred kinesis of a coon / hunt at midnight—hounds with fetus-colored tongues / aloll, men whoop-drunk / around a campflame—& the ceaseless power // & telephone wire strung pole to pole / like wonky sutures.”

Hall’s diction style is a nonstop maximalist romp. And while some of his verbal switchbacks may not make literal sense upon closer inspection, we quickly cotton to the fact that restraint and strict realism are not the point here. Johnson City poet Jesse Graves notes in the book’s foreword that “Hall has an ear and a nose for both levity and heartbreak, and for the special unsentimental melancholy that emerges when these two are combined.”

Ian Hall’s Creekwater Mansions makes an indelible alchemy of all its motley elements. In a poem fittingly titled, “If I Know Me,” the final couplet reads: “I’ve never been able to get enough / of too much.” Make no mistake, this book knows itself well indeed.

Creekwater Mansions
By Ian Hall
EastOver Press
140 pages
$19.99

Gaylord Brewer’s Goodbye, Baby

Though the opening page of Gaylord Brewer’s Goodbye, Baby indicates the range of years these poems span (2008-2024), Brewer skillfully executes the cohesive impression of a continuous unfolding narrative. And though we have a clear sense of where the story is going, no internal energy is lost.

This is especially notable, given that the speaker’s loss — the final decline and death of a beloved pet — could be viewed as a small domestic drama. But Brewer imbues his speaker’s disquiet, pain, and grief with a real-time clocking of his subjective experience, while also echoing larger stories of turbulent change and loss.

A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Brewer has published in a wide range of genres (most recently, 2024’s essay collection, Before the Storm Takes It Away) and worked as a professor at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro for more than 30 years.

We join the speaker of Goodbye, Baby on the cusp of a great loss. He’s living his daily life, going to the market, caring for his garden, preparing meals, and all the while: “Every day, Lucy more frail.” This dog’s final decline sets a ticking clock within these poems, adding a sense of urgency to descriptions of everyday domesticity.

This elegiac collection is written almost entirely in elegant, untitled ghazals. Through a rigorous, polished deployment of form, Brewer pays fitting tribute to the significance of this personal loss.

Wrapped up with the story of losing Lucy, Brewer includes an alert attention to nature into the poems and a keen awareness of our lives’ finiteness in the shadow of this vast turning cycle of seasons. Observing the movements of animals all around him in a quiet moment in nature, the speaker says, “We continue / to wait, quietly alive in this flash of eternity. / The weight of the waning day begins to lift.”

In a different poem, he takes a walk and spots “six big tom turkeys, bad boys with lots of pluck / who high-step aside only once I’m among them.” Then, when he spies a mink emerge from the “algae-choked water, over stones of the dry / cascade,” the speaker recalls that his wife had mentioned seeing it once before him. “I had no reason to doubt her, but / these sad days as they are, I needed to see to believe.”

Another significant subject of this collection is the force of beauty in our lives. One poem includes a consideration of “Stendahl Syndrome,” or “hallucination, fainting before great beauty.” Several poems describe the pleasures of food, lovingly prepared and served, even if the provenance of certain ingredients may be questionable. Not everything can be locally sourced. “The gin is always a problem. Or solution, depending.”

The speaker also describes his love of writing and literature. He prizes the beauty of language’s specificity and, sometimes, the insufficiency of words to fit the enormity of what we’re experiencing. On the precipice of loss, accompanying the last hours of Lucy’s life, “[I] resumed my butchery of the language / to define a future I did not want.”

Grieving this beloved animal — and recognizing the passage of many years spent alongside her — forms the heart of this warm but unsentimental collection. Goodbye, Baby refuses to diminish this loss’s importance, finding a tonal balance between pathos and the speaker’s laser-focused observations and insights about the fast-changing world around him.

Goodbye, Baby
By Gaylord Brewer
Accents Publishing
98 pages
$19

Rachel Landrum Crumble’s In Praise of Detours

Throughout In Praise of Detours, Chattanooga poet Rachel Landrum Crumble illuminates the surprising ways that life can redirect us down unexpected roads. These moments of “detour” often lead us toward the great loves, conflicts, and adventures that come to define us, even though we could never have predicted them.

A “Yankee transplant” living in Chattanooga, Crumble places her decades-long interracial marriage at the center of this collection, establishing in the touching title poem how embracing the arrival of a surprising partner set both spouses down a loving path that provided them both with greater agency over their choices.

“Portrait of a House After 26 Years” lists the belongings and detritus accumulated throughout many “years of struggle, wonder, regret, / and joy, endlessly repeated.” Still, the speaker wonders, “where is the place where things cohere.”

In this home, where decades of life have unfolded, trade-offs and choices were necessary to weather a myriad of daily costs and childrearing. Now those children have grown. Surrounded by so much abundant, variegated evidence of family life, the speaker declares, “here we are, Love, in a house worn out / by our own history, / emptying of the ones who made it.”

Other poems hint at much darker aspects of family life. In “Cold,” the speaker recalls a distressing exchange in a car with a troubled parent. After years of pushing away such memories, then comes the speaker’s sudden shift, “It took me years to recognize / your face in my mirror / now that I, too, have seen / the death of many dreams.”

In a number of poems, Crumble explores how our perspectives evolve as we move from one generational perspective to another as time passes. “After Thanksgiving” captures this experience. “Seasons will not relent, nor ask permission,” Crumble writes. “Let me relinquish again like the maple / my most beautiful and prized… / Days let go, like leaves / the wind.”

The poem’s speaker goes on to note the necessity of accepting change: “If I do not let go, I will become a winter death tree, / shaking old gray leaves like bones in February.”

Potent, turbulent departures from the familiar also occur on a broader societal scale, of course. Unexpected dangers and treasures can be found there, too, and Crumble tackles these subjects with the same tone of intimate reflection that she brings to poems about more apparently personal subjects. “Headlines: Things We Never Dreamed” and “Five Months Before the 2024 Election” delve into the subjective experience of trying to process the sense of rising dread at current events.

Several poems bring this perspective to memories of the pandemic era, including “Masked/Unmasked.”  “Finally, we are forced / to breathe our own stale air, / to taste the bad breath / of our own mortality.”

But the speaker addresses also a larger sense of accountability: “If we confess our own injustice, / and not another’s maybe then / we can put on funeral clothes, / untie the grief knotting our throats / and join the ancient lament.”

By the book’s final poems, Crumble also incorporates the subject of racism as an equally personal and collective “ancient lament.” “Wade in the Water: A Prayer of Lament,” chronicles the speaker’s memories of racist encounters endured throughout her marriage and mothering of multiracial children. Elsewhere, Crumble describes racism as “a proclivity … in the human to make self / the measure of all things.”

Individually and collectively, Crumble insists, we must learn to decenter ourselves, to put an end to othering and objectifying based on the blinders of privilege and our limited perspectives. And we must grieve simpler sets of assumptions or illusions about our lives’ trajectories, which fall away as we experience welters of change.

In Praise of Detours exposes this emotionally richly terrain. There, we may discover all our unforeseen lives, unfolding all around us — if we have the courage and good sense to embrace them.

In Praise of Detours
By Rachel Landrum Crumble
Main Street Rag Publishing
90 pages
$15