Autobiography of My Hand by Kurt S. Olsson

The first poem in Bright Hill Press’ 2005 Poetry Chapbook winner, “Grace”, begins:

They are here to teach him about power,

a gang of ten-year-olds. Hands tied to his shoes,

he kneels before them. Face smeared

with jelly, ears plugged with bread,

he does not cry out: no one can save him.

It is the most visceral, the most frightening, perhaps the most beautiful one in the book. “Grace” ends as a sort of resistance-poem, as the “he” never screams, the gang eventually tires, and the victim has the last word. Other poems in Autobiography of My Hand might have a similarly discomforting effect on readers as “Grace”, but none have its relentless force.

So much seems so drab here (the physical and emotional ailments of childhood and adolescence, a greasy spoon, a Burger King bathroom) and is presented with such reserved urbanity (a habit for the second person, the dash of surrealism, unbearable and unsurprising run-on catalogs of dream imagery, oxymoronic titles and turns, historical re-imaginings, explorations of hypotheticals), it’s easy to feel inferior to such cool, over-clevered. You can only get by for so long with touring the oddities of the everyday, followed by a lyrically philosophical closing line.

“Off Hours” comes close to the drive of “Grace”, as a daughter watches her aging father take his shoes and socks off, troubled to believe that the broken man is her father. The film-like movement of imagery is brilliantly done, but the end is lopsided, curt.

Similarly, “Which Is To Say” mini-catalogs what a grandfather loved and didn’t love, and what those tastes meant. It is extraordinary until its finish: “The last time I saw him he was taped to a purple La-Z-Boy / he wouldn’t have bought in a room he wouldn’t have let / and he turned to me and he said, How’d you get on this flight, / which is to say something, just what I cannot tell you.” If only Olsson weren’t married to that last rhetorical hit of “which is to say.” It is at once sincere and smells like pose.

“Drinking with Li Po” is a knockout. An educated but delusional speaker, partying with friends, tries to think something more than “America” but never does, and finally relents, “maybe it’s nothing to do with anything, but when I hurtle out / to the roofless outhouse and sway hard into the steam piss makes, / I glance up and — I swear — see every star ever made.”

Olsson does pull off some surprising upsets: “Heartache Rings Again” personifies heartache, but happily in an adversarial manner. “One Chance” begins with the eye-roller “What if God were a dog?” but ends poignantly, “Your dog is loping toward you, six months old, / paws like fresh snow and you say, Wait. Then, / Please. Knowing you’re too far to ever go back again.”

Attitude-wise, Olsson is pretty squarely post-modern in that his poems tend to skirt narratives and express only the edges of emotion — the work seems distrustful of language’s ability to hold; on the other hand, his delivery is that of a wryly zany slam poet (one speaker is vigilant for “not happiness exactly, but close enough”), comic, amusing at times, but never laugh-out-loud funny.

For the most part, I bristle at this kind of two-fisted writing, but the more I’ve read, the more poems have grown on me. Olsson’s first full-length book What Kills What Kills Us is due out in early 2007 from Silverfish Review Press (www.silverfishreviewpress.com), and it’s hard to imagine 50-plus pages like this holding up, but we’ll see.