PLUNGING INTO THE ERA OF FIXING
Megan M. WOng
On The Luckless Age (Red Hen Press, 2011) by Steve Kistulentz
Steve Kistulentz’s first book of poetry, The Luckless Age, unleashes on the reader wave
after wave of pierced nostalgia with the artfulness of a storyteller and the deftness
of a lyric poet. The poems render an era represented by larger-than-life celebrities,
eternal song lyrics, and interminable dreams—an era that crashed into its inevitable
reality. Hot Child in the City insists “ . . . this is a genre story, without the possibility of
a prince or a happy end, // just a match, then fire, a girl who thought she needed a big
bad wolf.” The book cuts into the moments of that era and “merely pulls out/ the bitter
parables already brewing beneath skin.” Kistulentz uses long, seething sentences and
harsh, concrete imagery to plunge into the brokenness of an era that just wanted to
get fixed.
His first poem, “I. World’s Forgotten Twentieth-Century Boy” begins “Here, my
century as it actually was.” and is followed by “II. Places That Are Gone” which is
more an introduction of a boy, new to the big city, “headed out/ on the town, headlong
into a luckless age of methamphetamine // and humbucking guitars.” This speaker
establishes his young, new self as forgotten and lost. What’s left is the rest of the book:
a back and forth between locating the self in that past era and expressing the roiling
life of that self and era.
The tone fluctuates between omniscient matter-of-fact and very, desperately alive.
“The world’s a mess, it’s in my kiss, said the song, / to which I said, play it louder, play
it meaner. / Play it fast enough that your forearm muscles / burn and stand, Popeyelike, grotesque and proud.” Verbs and adjectives repeat and transform and fall into
each other until the poems are seething and reaching for each other in what feels like
a desperate attempt at finding order. One of the most engaging qualities of the book
is Kistulentz’s use of long lines and long, complex sentences. In some cases, these long
sentences give the poems time to revel in their atmosphere before setting up a point:
At that level of vodka where night becomes magnanimous,
let us be true primitives and swing to a quiet species
of jazzology, that deductive science so intuitive at four a.m.
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PLunging into the Era of FIxing Megan M. Wong
With its drawn-out syllables and languorous sound, the beginning of “Roaratorio”
sets the reader up for the kind of realization that comes late at night, that Only an
imbecile tries to kiss time, / or demands sense of all the music, the smoky meannesses… In
other cases, the long sentences allow the reader time to digest a pop culture reference
or unfamiliar term or savor the rich sonic qualities of “black noise from a season of
amperes and high voltage, / high wattage electroencephalogram and anti-convulsive
meds.” against the next, more readily accessible lines, “Season to pick up a pawnshop
guitar and three chords, // learn how to love this dark world, the hours lost in it.”
More than anything, the poems urge the reader to take part, arguing that they
never linger over beauty,
until a thing has at least once been shattered, then stitched together,
and I know you, too, must feel this way, as your fingers dawdle
over the story of every canyonesque scar on this blessed, broken body.
By the final poem, “Abyssinia,” we realize that there is no end to this book of
poems. This is what makes it so enjoyable to read again and again. The poems feed
off of each other and memorable lines press us to find them just one more time, just to
hear their resonances again before getting them out of our heads. In this, Kistulentz
has made poems that haunt us like the songs that haunt them.
Though The Luckless Age tells stories, it doesn’t focus on narrative—rather
Kistulentz focuses on expressing the emotional intensity—the “brokenness”—that
pervades all of these stories. The speaker of these poems knows the stories of this era
intimately—they are the stories of an era taught to dream big and chase after those
dreams. But he also knows how things turn out. Presenting himself as participant,
witness, and survivor, the speaker gains the reader’s trust and we are thrust into a
book that spirals into and back out of recurring themes and key phrases. Versions
of the phrase, they call it fixing: we do it when we are broken, repeat until the reader
understands that there is no comprehensive narrative, no satisfying ending, to be
found. Rather, the reader understands that we live in a world where we’re broken, over
and over again, broken by what cannot fix us on top of what we wanted to fix us. Our
brokenness is both a symptom of our era and a reason for it. This is a speaker who
mourns the failings of an era by plunging into the remembered belly of it. And the
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consequent insight is devastating: all we can do is live and break and live some more.
And we call that fixing.
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