Rail

April 2, 2018
Poet and filmmaker Carlson-Wee’s debut traces an itinerant path through forgotten places and oft-ignored voices of the rural U.S. in the wake of the Great Recession. These lyrics, remarkable for their unpretentious, un-performative Americana, accumulate images, secondhand stories, and plainspoken observations while avoiding the rhetorical signaling so common in rural poetics. “I find it here in the wild alfalfa, head full/ of antipsychotics and blue rain,” he begins, writing as a 20-year-old hopping a freight train. Carlson-Wee’s accumulative method results in a sort of American abundance tinged with melancholy and visions of globalized freight. His strongest moments are of quiet, brutal lyric beauty, as in the gutting of a fish: “And the fact of death goes sliding out/ on the perfect glass of the lake.” The work can sometimes feel repetitive in content (“The road goes on. With or without us.”) or form and function (the cataloging of natural or industrial images, or development according to a repeated phrase), but Carlson-Wee rescues many lines from the brink of cliché (“even/ death, in its marble skies and free-wheeling borders/ is an art of remembering everything over”). Throughout, Carlson-Wee displays an uncanny knack for foregrounding the faceless elements of modernity against what could be a mythic existence: “you turned to forget who I was/ and left through the automatic doors.”

May 15, 2018

Do lonesome young men still hop freight trains? They do in Carlson-Wee's mournfully beautiful debut collection, which takes us through a world of "Boarded-up storefronts, burned-down/ apartments, highway signs that only name/ the dead." The poet's picture of a fading heartland captures the despair many Americans feel today, and he parallels economic and personal desperation; "I felt the roof of my head break and clatter/ to the floor," says a poem pointedly titled "Depression." Elsewhere, there's tenderness and a sense of wonder: "Butterfly caught in the backwind, dancing a dead loop./ Friends now, I.../ shelter him under my shirt." VERDICT Carlson-Wee effectively uses repetition to build tension in poems that are deceptively simple and homey, and the tempered language draws readers into his heartfelt lines. Even those who don't typically read poetry will enjoy.

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