{"id":374,"date":"2012-03-14T22:42:20","date_gmt":"2012-03-14T22:42:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.basaltmagazine.com\/?p=374"},"modified":"2012-03-14T22:42:20","modified_gmt":"2012-03-14T22:42:20","slug":"review-of-about-the-dead-by-travis-mossotti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/2012\/03\/14\/review-of-about-the-dead-by-travis-mossotti\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of About the Dead by Travis Mossotti,"},"content":{"rendered":"

About the Dead<\/em> by Travis Mossotti,
\nUtah State University Press, Cloth $19.95<\/p>\n

reviewed by James Crews<\/p>\n

In his 2011 May Swenson Award-winning first book, About the Dead<\/em>, Travis Mossotti sketches a larger-than-life canvas for his readers, taking us from Van Gogh\u2019s home in Arles, France to Aynor, South Carolina, to the Meramec River in \u201cbackwoods\u201d Sullivan, Missouri and far beyond. It\u2019s no surprise that Garrison Keillor culled Mossotti\u2019s manuscript from hundreds of other entries, for About the Dead<\/em> is nothing if not distinctly American; see, for instance the \u201cbox cars,\u201d \u201cfencerows,\u201d \u201csweet flag,\u201d and \u201cfried okra.\u201d Follow the speaker and his cast of hard-luck characters as they veer toward the realization at the heart of each poem in this collection: \u201cthere is no other life but this.\u201d Grief\u2014from a father\u2019s death, we guess\u2014finds its way into many of these poems and is especially palpable in the book\u2019s long opening piece, \u201cDecampment\u201d (also a haunting animated short adapted by the poet\u2019s brother, Josh). This poem signals immediately there will be no refuge in the sterile lyric, no nod to safety in this collection. Mossotti is betting everything he has and raising the stakes. \u201cIt\u2019s No Secret,\u201d which shows this poet at his unsentimental best, finds a speaker trapped in an airport, confessing:<\/p>\n

\u00a0. . . I wish I could tell the girl<\/em>
\nwith pigtails and wings for arms<\/em>
\nthat we\u2019re all secretly waiting<\/em>
\nfor the moment our bodies unbuckle<\/em>
\nfrom the ground and rise into blue . . .<\/em><\/p>\n

True, but Mossotti can\u2019t let it go at that\u2014he\u2019s come by too much knowledge the hard way, and so he has to drag us back down to earth:<\/p>\n

. . . I imagine that, like me, one day<\/em>
\nshe will find her father gripping<\/em>
\nthe armrest of the red sofa, eyes<\/em>
\nlike white marbles cut in half,<\/em>
\nscotch melted into water on a coaster.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cEyes\/like white marbles cut in half\u201d captures the image of the silent, withdrawn father\u2014which is all fathers, we realize, at some point. And so many of these poems dwell in that space of clarity where innocence\u2014however much we had to begin with\u2014is forever replaced by hard knowing. The poet\u2019s no victim, though; he\u2019s just after the plain-spoken truth, often delivered in sucker-punch lines that leave us reeling. \u201cThe one who hangs on the longest dies twice,\u201d he tells us at the end of \u201cBarber.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike so many books of poems published these days, About the Dead<\/em> tracks real things and real people struggling through their lives. It is unabashedly narrative but is also at times funny, shifting, undaunted by the challenge of telling a good story or constructing the flawless moment. Mossotti revels in the daily strangenesses that show up at our doorsteps and moves from a night at the Red Roof Inn \u201creeking from the awful, \/ yellow liver of the last trucker \/ who slept here,\u201d to the \u201cbreaking news\u201d of \u201ca pastor sermonizing Nietzsche \/ burst into flame.\u201d He wants us to smile with him too, when he declares, \u201cSo I married the daughter of a police captain,\u201d in spite of \u201cone flagrant \/ violation of order and decency after another.\u201d And in \u201cThe Funhouse of Mirth,\u201d like a carnival barker he\u2019s articulating his own poetics (though he\u2019d never use that word) but warning us at the same time:<\/p>\n

. . . If there\u2019s a storyline here it spirals<\/em>
\nlike a tourniquet and only has room for two strangers<\/em>
\nwaving pistols from the Pyrenees to a truckstop waitress<\/em>
\nin Kansas . . .<\/em><\/p>\n

Mossotti is always letting us in on his project, acknowledging and half-apologizing\u2014 unnecessarily, one might add\u2014for the picaresque quality of his narratives. One turns to poems like these because we sense what fun the poet had actually getting them on the page, and as Keillor points out in his fine introduction to the collection, any slow, pleasurable \u201cclimb\u201d through this book will reward us tenfold, leading \u201cto a magnificent view,\u201d and perhaps a better understanding of ourselves.<\/p>\n

It might have been the reference to Paris and the Catacombs in the book\u2019s title poem (\u201cbones\u2014\/stacked so neatly\u201d), or the young couple the speaker sees \u201cfucking\/ on Jim Morrison\u2019s grave,\u201d but as I read About the Dead<\/em>, I kept thinking of James Baldwin\u2019s novel, Giovanni\u2019s Room,<\/em> the words of one character seeming especially apt:<\/p>\n

You have never loved anyone, I am sure you never will! You love your purity, you love your mirror . . . You want to be clean. You think you came here covered in soap\u2014and you think you will go out covered with soap\u2014and you do not want to stink, not even for five minutes in the meantime.<\/em><\/p>\n

Travis Mossotti\u2019s poems bring us more deeply into our humanness but with tenderness for this \u201csoft, dysfunctional, waiting earth\u201d on which we\u2019re all doing our best. \u201cTake off your shoes, please,\u201d he says, but we know it\u2019s not so things stay clean; he wants us to kick back and enjoy this wonder-fueled roadtrip. And don\u2019t trust him either when he says, \u201cThis house isn\u2019t much to look at.\u201d<\/p>\n

Crack open About the Dead<\/em> to just about any page and start reading these lasting, risky, rollicking poems.<\/p>\n

You won\u2019t want to stop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About the Dead by Travis Mossotti, Utah State University Press, Cloth $19.95 reviewed by James Crews In his 2011 May Swenson Award-winning first book, About the Dead, Travis Mossotti sketches a larger-than-life canvas for his readers, taking us from Van Gogh\u2019s home in Arles, France to Aynor, South Carolina, to the Meramec River in \u201cbackwoods\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[10,23,53],"class_list":["post-374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-about-the-dead","tag-garrison-keillor","tag-travis-mossotti"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}