With an irresistibly zany and vaudevillian energy, these poems begin in an anecdotal mode fully suited to recounting a 2,523 banjo hootenanny or a party at which the host serves 800 scrambled eggs—enough to fill a plate the size of a hot tub. That mode gains depth and resonance, turning toward the elegiac, the poignantly surreal. In one poem, the speaker alternately smears and cleans a sliding glass door until he can look through it and see the “… animals on the edges of time, performing / the rituals from which they were born.” Each of Scott Poole’s artfully colloquial poems visits the “…. places / we never thought / we could go for love / or the loss of it.”

Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate
Author of The Voluptuary, Blood-Silk, and The Wild Awake.

Shelving

I bought some shelving the other day
and installed it in my garage. I lined it
with blow up rafts, paint cans,
gardening tools, a car battery
some foam coolers, some basketballs,
a few cheap red toolboxes,
and on the wall next to it
a poster of a woman in a bikini
holding a cordless power drill.

Why stop there?
I put some shelving up in my car.
I took out the back seat and built a small library.
Every book was about walking
down the street. If I felt attuned
to my fellow pedestrians,
I would throw a book at them as I drove by.
Of course, it amazed them --
I always had the right book for the occasion.

I was so excited.
I built shelving onto myself.
People would store parts of their lives on me.
However, it was difficult to move around
with the burden of history, keeping track
yet still moving on.