TRUTH VIA TYPEWRITER IN ADAM GRABOWSKI’S ‘GO ON BEWILDERMENT’
Reviewer Lisa Folkmire won Ann Arbor’s Current Magazine 2017 Poetry Contest with her poem “First Wolf.” She earned her MFA in Writing (poetry) from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poems have appeared in Alegrarse, Okay Donkey, The Mantle, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Barren Magazine, Occulum, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others.
Go On Bewilderment: Typewriter Poems
by Adam Grabowski
Attack Bear Press
It’s odd to think about: somebody setting up shop with a typewriter to draw strangers into his personal space for the sake of poetry. But that’s just the gift that Adam Grabowski gives us in Go On Bewilderment. The chapbook is a compilation of Courier structured poems. True to form, Grabowski writes in his intro: “As a rule, any other grammatical or syntactical oddity that felt intuitive to the moment remains, for good or ill.” This is a chapbook of honesty within the form itself. It’s the poetry equivalent to a photo album of candid shots. A quick reminder to tell us all “we’re not so far away.”
The poems themselves are soft, they’re not here to prove an entirely new view of the world, but instead simple truths that we all rely on. He takes these truths and sets them up in bedrooms and bookshops so humbly described that they sneak into the reader’s imagination with a firm familiarity. In his poem “Ramen,” he writes “in this time/take pictures and ask for nothing less/than everything/and they are right.” He surrounds this advice with the scent of cigarette from a resident ghost and the comfort it brings. Much like the ghost, the advice is of the tried and true variety, something that has been lingering on peoples’ lips for years. But Grabowski brings it to a whole new light. Like moving a piece of furniture from one room to another, he has a refreshing take on the familiar.
Within this familiarity, Grabowski also plays with the bizarre. In his poem, “Fox,” he writes, “a snowing inside you/that I know that I follow/out of the darkeness/ask me anything you want.” These moments come up without warning, a nod to the typewriter-in-public approach that led to such tiny, wondrous poems. A true poet—able to speak simple truths and allow them to interact with the uncanny, and see what the audience says. Grabowski has a steady know-how in the way his voice interacts with the poems, while still maintaining a humble nature.
In what was once supposed to be a collection of lovely poems written as offerings to strangers, we now have a collection that almost serves as a pre-COVID scrapbook. A “remember when” of sorts and a testament to a time of random bump-ins at stores and awkward conversations with strangers that you accidentally (or purposefully) exchanged smiles with. There’s something to be said about an experimental piece so perfectly timed and Grabowski’s voice shepherding us through.
Purchase Go On Bewilderment at Attack Bear Press
See reviewer Lisa Folkmire’s poetry here.
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