Something is about to be split open and I think it might be a breast bone. An internal organ, never meant to meet light or air, will be exposed to both, to examination and infection, truth and danger. It’s not a metaphorical heart, but a real one, with blood and disappointment. There are memories in the bones being sawed. This matters.

This opening changes everything. Grammar is medically dissected, commas, periods, apostrophes, are extracted. What is the use of line breaks on an operating table? There is no room left for anything but artfully brutal honesty and maybe that is why I sobbed while reading “to the saint about to rearrange the humble apartment of my chest.” The poem seems to speak about the heart being operated on, but takes on the quality of the heart speaking. The heart has ordinary and desperate things to say. In the heart is beers at ohenrys, a mother’s face in her casket, intangible desires.

The poems are aesthetically compelling. They share a form- blocky paragraphs spilling out with dream logic and musical ramble- that feels inventive and necessary. In the poem, “song sung with eyes closed to distract from a burning catheter,” the text runs river-like, rushing, repeating, changing direction. Memorable lines wash up. “no one could say why but we were born the fish and the trees split open to reveal their ideas.” The style- voice driven and image rich- feels intimate and pressing. Consider the density of the image that begins the poem, “if it is in my bones it must be way down there.” “marrow shell graveburied under inches of meat a great lakes shipwreck.” Already the world underneath the skin is viscerally textured and wild with mystery.

I was shocked back into my body by the pieces, reminded me of what I’m walking around inside- a temporal shell that is both distinct and shared, operating under the same unavoidable rules as every other body, while also uniquely mine. The body in these poems contains deer stand missouri and corn crib illinois. Carpets made of salt. Coalsmeared kentucky kinsfolk. It doesn’t contain any of the things mine contains and yet all of the same things.

The poems live on the precipice, in pre-op, post-op and what happens in between. A desire is laid bare, to say what could be last words. To read them is to encounter the writer who “had already given myself to whichever of gods secrets came true next,” and then frantically scribbled that secret down for us to read.