Because

April 15, 2018

Mensch, founder and editor of the online magazine B O D Y, is a visual artist as well as poet; the subtitle of this, his first book, is a courageous attempt at the very difficult form of the narrative in verse, and the challenge is redoubled by the painful subject matter. The memories go back to the later 1980s and concern the narrator's relationship with an engaging adult, director of a wilderness youth camp, who charms, abuses, and betrays the boys entrusted to him. The narrative is relayed in a loose forward-moving chronology of brief, dated vignettes; the connective devices are the word because, which opens each section, and the semicolon--not a full stop--that then closes the section. There is purpose to these, the first a fruitless search for blame or reason or meaning within events or characters and the last an effective expression of the indeterminacy that surrounds that search. The lyricism in this lyric memoir is minimal, to say the least, and the tone and style have some kinship with the hardscrabble fiction of Jason Brown; the narrative allows the author to bear witness to a grim tale of abuse that is still, alas, timely. VERDICT More important and impressive as testimony, perhaps, than as poetry, Mensch's first volume should find an audience in recovery circles as well as among poetry readers.--Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA

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