Throughout the poem, numerous themes reappear, with perhaps the most prominent being exile. One might presume that the speaker largely resembles Zaher himself, who was born in Cairo but now lives in Seattle. Despite the revolution that is happening in his hometown, he must continue to work on the menial tasks whose insignificance can only increase against the backdrop of the Arab Spring and the tumultuous and hopeful time that has followed: “I am still expected to solve important business problems / Cairo, I miss walking your streets before dawn.”

However, the exile that occurs in this poem is more than just that of someone living away from his or her homeland. It is multiple, as the speaker claims, “It is time to exchange one exile for another.” There is emotional and sexual exile too. Love, or rather lack thereof, is another prominent theme in this collection. It’s no surprise that a speaker who refers now and again to the Udhri poets sees himself walking the city streets “without the chance of sex.” With all of it’s disconnect and sense of isolation (“I attached my desires to this email”), Thank You for the Window Office reads like an updated “Wasteland,” except it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s plenty of humor here (“Hopefully you can see / This poem is struggling hard / To be on someone’s top ten list”), and hope and playfulness too:

Hello roller coaster
Hello soup du jour precious feelings
Here we do sales
There they do shopping
In the resurrection’s parade
I took a different name
Which was an inevitable twist to the plot
Yet someone in the organization had to ask:
“Is people management an essential skill?”
The bohemian is still alive

Marxist ideology also pervades the text: people are defined as means of production, and love collapses “[u]nder the mercy of production.” The reader is told, “One of us will get to be the boss / And feel the joys of the class system,” and the disenfranchised are everywhere, from the homeless person on the street who goes unnoticed, to the workers in the office who lack any real power.

The office, or office culture, plays a dominant role in the text. As someone who works in a cubicle, I know all too well the language of strategic plans (I once received a list of “useful verbs” for writing outcomes and objectives). As a poet, I recognize the fun in this language, and Zaher does too as he writes of Casual Fridays, IT departments, and computer viruses, and claims, “We will integrate our business strategy / With God’s will.” However, there is also a dark edge here, as the speaker is working under the threat of outsourced jobs and riffs on Ginsberg: “I saw the great minds of my generation working / For Microsoft and Boeing to be laid off later / Like dogs.” And later, he references O’Hara: “My lunch poems were composed over Chinese take out / While we decided whom to fire.”

The anxiety that exists within this poem, and likely within the modern worker too, is political. Zaher writes, “There is a heavy political component to all this twitching.” There is much bewildering about the time we live in, that we can go from worrying about a restaurant menu to thinking about corporate strategies and then consider the world at large. And there is much exasperation too, as children grow into adulthood and discover things aren’t quite what they expected. Thank You for the Window Office perfectly portrays this lack. Life is varied and wondrous and disappointing. Zaher writes, “Life better be a song / That is starting soon,” and we move through our day and consider our vulnerabilities while we scan a restaurant menu and hope that the song starts soon.

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The poems that make up this collection are largely about the interior–the speakers alone with their thoughts. Like a contemporary Rimbaud, Mirov interrogates himself through a derangement of the senses and what he discovers is frequently sad and occasionally nonsensical. In “A Kiss on the Purplish Light,” the speaker says, “My mind began to wander,” which largely explains the movement that occurs from line-to-line in many of the poems throughout the collection. They frequently move in a way that one’s thoughts might, shifting from subject-to-subject as one thought skips to the next. The disjointedness that occurs feels natural; there is nothing forced here. However, this is not to say there is not an art to this. Every poem is concise and well-crafted.

One of the derangements that occurs in the collection is the distortion of language as nouns become verbs, “You’ve mistaked a lot of mades” (from “For Ben Mirror”), and closely related words take the place of what would be expected, as in the poem “The Poem Addresses Ben Mirov in a State of Inconsolable Grief”:

Return to your bone.
Park your star in the garbage.
Go back in tide and climb into sled.
Try not think about
Amanda’s amputated nest
or the broom where Greg
cradled a nun in his hands.
What can you do but rake up next morning
and make yourself some legs?

In “Snowliloquy” the language derangement helps to create a distance for the speaker, as if he is embarrassed by his own feelings and so turns to self-mocking:

Loneliness is something more
than nothingness. It’s Snowbody
touching your thigh in bed. Snowbody

chopping the peppers for the soup. Snowbody
calling your name from the control room
late one night. When Snowone is around

you think about them. Or you gauge
the rate of your disintegration.
The exact amount of detritus

you’ll leave floating through your friends.
Maybe you fall apart. Or you break off
a shard and send it to someone else.

A crystal stranger taking off their mask.
No more transmissions for tonight.
Signed, Yours Truly, Ben Mirov

Or perhaps it isn’t a distancing mechanism, but rather simply that the transmission isn’t coming through clearly and it’s the static that is creating the “s” sound. Nonetheless, there is something sad and tender about the presence of snow (and also something that recalls childish “it’s snot” jokes). On the next page, the title “Dove Life” easily echoes “love life,” for once the reader enters this world of multiplicities and malleable language, the incongruities appear everywhere.

Hider Roser offers a lot more than this language play. There are ominous figures, like Dave the radiologist and Mr. Squiggles, a dying possum named after the speaker’s god. There are prose poems, prophecies, and sets of instructions. There are gorgeous lyric poems like “Containment Unit for Mysterious Green Vapor” and “From the Corner of My Bathysphere I Write to You of Love.” There are a multiplicity of Ben Mirov’s including one kept in an aquarium and fed whole-grains and leafy greens. And in “Central Nervous,” there is a nightmare of offices, from the Office of the Fuck You Lunch to the Office of the Never-Ending Blink.

Overall there is an uncanniness to this collection. At first the poems may seem strange and perhaps even somewhat difficult, but there is something eerily familiar and comfortable there too. The speakers within Hider Roser are not just interrogating themselves; they are also asking the reader to look deeper too. In “Candles,” the speaker instructs, “Now open your eyes. / Not those eyes. / The eyes inside you.”

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Eileen Myles has published more than twenty books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, plays, and libretti. However, she is probably first and foremost known as a poet. With Snowflake / different streets, she returns to the form for the first time since the 2007 publication of Sorry, Tree. Published as a flipbook, Snowflake / different streets is actually two separate collections, each with its own set of themes and concerns, but each marked with the characteristic short lines and quotidian subjects that readers have come to expect from Myles.

Snowflake opens with a poem titled “Transitions,” and that seems to largely get at what this collection is about–a time of change, uncertainty, unease, and restlessness. The poems find the speaker alone with her thoughts, often traveling from one place to another, whether by car or plane, so even the landscape is in a state of change. Even with the movement, there is a sense of suspension, as she concludes “Transitions”:

I hold the
line I hold
the day
I watch the snowflake
melting

The speaker seems to be stuck between the past and whatever is to come next. In the title poem, the speaker has more agency, moving her ex-lover’s items into storage and changing the locks. However, it’s not just a revenge narrative; the speaker reflects on her loneliness and isolation, finding the inability to relate to anyone: “There’s no female / in my position // There’s no man.” She finds herself to be the only witness to events around her:

wow
there’s a raccoon
on the tail
of the plane
and there’s
no one

seeing that now
but me

and there’s no one close
enough

Myles is much more introverted here than in her previous book of poems. In this collection, she’s not simply lamenting a lost relationship, though that’s certainly part of it. There’s a sense that the author is getting older and has seen how the environment has changed (“you could put your hand in the water / & hit a fish or two // now you gotta / go look”) and how technology has changed, perhaps creating more distance between one another. She laments the phone as no longer being the same string connecting people, but now “we carry / them and / have no homes.” However, Snowflake isn’t all doom and gloom. It also includes funny observations, such as in the poem “Observance,” about traffic in Los Angeles, and it includes a great love poem titled “Girlfriend.” In “To My Class,” Myles writes that she’s trying to sort some things out at this time in her life and that “the body / place is / a thinking / place.” Snowflake offers a glimpse into the thinking.

In different streets, the companion to Snowflake, Myles offers the meta-commentary: “The new poems / are poems of / healing. / But first I’ll / be funny.” And overall they are lighter than the poems in Snowflake, but there remains an attention to aging, though it isn’t portrayed as a bad thing because it brings the wisdom that “[a]nyone / can be beautiful / at 19 or 30.” In “pencil poem #5,” Myles writes, “it’s a strange gig / this body I’m riding / for 59 years,” which gets at the multitudes of experience–both good and bad–that one has, and also hints that no matter what age someone is, things will continue to surprise him or her.

The isolation that existed in the other collection is gone here. In “Mitten,” Myles writes:

Last
night in “Different
Streets” which I didn’t
bother to write I made
the point that the two places
are connected and it’s great
where you are too
and boom boom rumble
all the places are connected
thus the endless
beauty.

The poet/speaker is reconnected to the world around her and takes pleasure in the simple facts of the day, much like the speakers in Sorry, Tree. In “idiot ho,” she asks sans question mark whether it is mad “to say I / like May / so so so / much / at this exact moment // stupid, wet.” The reader senses that even if it is madness causing the behavior, it wouldn’t make any difference to the delight the speaker feels.

The speaker finds herself “stinking of love,” moving through the collection with energy and a willingness to face the day with full force. However, much as Snowflake wasn’t all dark, different streets isn’t all highs. In “smile,” the speaker says, “I would go out into the world with this / enormous hurt. And I have carried mine / for so long I now know it’s nothing special.” In other poems, she describes herself as a monster who will cry until the end of her life. However, the voice doesn’t come across as self-pitying; rather, it’s wise, the voice of someone who contains multitudes.

Several poems stand out in different streets, including “the nervous entertainment,” “the weather,” “mitten,” and “the perfect faceless fish,” but every poem has something to offer. Myles can pack a lot into few words, such as in “2008: for emma,” a seven line poem that concludes: “The bed not so much / made / as simply / closed.” Another poem, “became” describes Myles’s desire to stuff a day full of details:

today
is so subtle
I can jam tiny details
in its jaw
& it holds them
it’s a strong day
that can withstand change

From these two new books, the reader can gather that it isn’t just the day that is strong and can withstand change, but the same words can be applied to the speakers of these poems and to Myles herself.

Read “15 Minutes,” a new poem from Eileen Myles and our day 13 entry of The Rumpus’s 2012 National Poetry Month Project.

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Even though Old News, Ryan Eckes’ first book of poems, is very much a Philadelphia book, the poems can easily register with anyone who has lived in a close-knit neighborhood or who has tried to be a part of a community and knows the feeling of wanting to be accepted but not quite fitting in, stuck with the label of “newcomer,” or “outsider,” or simply “not-one-of-us.” Despite being a native of Philadelphia, Eckes finds himself in new territory when he moves to an Italian neighborhood in South Philly. According to the author’s bio note, these poems were written over the course of one year, from Spring 2008 to Spring 2009, and chart Eckes moving into a new home and seeing his marriage end. The poems also offer a glimpse into Philadelphia’s strange past, based on old news articles from 1923 which were found covering the floor when Eckes tore out the old carpets in his house.

The poems run between lyric and narrative with many of them having a steam-of-conscious-like feel as the speaker makes leaps in ideas and imagery from line-to-line. The second poem in the book, “odd years,” raises the question, sans question mark, “where are we going,” a question that hints at an underlying restlessness and/or lack of direction, a question that shows up again later in the collection. The poems spring from the purchase of a house and deal in part with what goes into making it a home–roofers, neighbors, and lawn care. But a sense of discomfort underlies this attempt to settle in. In “jogging the O,” a title which recalls a mouse running in a wheel getting nowhere, Eckes writes, “people say but you own it / but i know it owns me.”

One of the sources of the speaker’s discomfort is his neighbor Frankie, who is first described in “how to get around”:

he still works for the union, listens to rush limbaugh, and complains about the traffic in this town. you think it’s pushing you, he says, but you’re really dragging it. so why don’t you just take the subway, i say. ah, the subway, he says, well the subway’s a little too dark for me if you know what i mean.

Despite Frankie’s racism, he is someone the speaker has to deal with in his neighborhood. At times the speaker even wonders what he has done to upset Frankie: “why won’t Frankie talk to me? / when i say hello i get barely / a nod back” (from “cake”). However, the speaker allows his anger to boil over in “inside the scowl,” a poem that looks at separate instances of racism in the neighborhood, from the Italian men on the corner scowling as the speaker walks by with his wife, who is South American, to letters trashing Barack Obama in the South Philly Review, to his own participation in segregation:

…and i thought of my daily

rituals–joining the herd of other white people

after work as they spill out the east exit

of tasker-morris station while the blacks

herd themselves out the west exit and then

walking home along that border–how

ridiculous, i thought, this frustration we call

broad street–

For the speaker, Frankie becomes the embodiment of all of this. However, he remains to be a source of confusion for the speaker. In a later poem, “every 20 minutes,” Frankie tells someone that at one time you would find another dialect just by walking twenty minutes in any direction. The speaker says, “i can’t tell if he laments a more integrated / homogenized present / or if he prefers it.”

The speaker’s relationship is another source of conflict in the collection. Early in the book, “in love,” begins with a scene of happiness:

we biked down broad as fast we could

caught dust in our eyes and laughed

knowing the storm would beat us home

having said fuck it all lightning wind

the whole bit and we rode into total

downpour

But as the speaker races into the house, his wife remains behind, crying and holding up a recently planted sapling in their yard. She calls on him to grab string from the house, but he is too slow, so she races past him and saves the tree herself. There’s an ambiguity at the end of the poem where the speaker stands there watching on “soaked in dumbness dumbstruck.” Does the speechlessness arise from respect and awe at his wife for taking charge and saving this tree? Or is there something else there–why was this tree, described as “little charlie brown xmas tree,” so significant? The tree becomes a symbol for their relationship–young and struggling:

we dumped how much water into that thing its leaves burned up anyway and gone by the start of fall: bare, crude fork stuck in the sidewalk like a spade, still there, stupid. metaphor for my marriage, em’s marriage. (from “little charlie brown xmas tree”)

Despite the book encompassing the gloom of a failed marriage and addressing twenty-first century racism, there are a number of beautiful moments throughout and some humor too, like in “a conversation,” that shows conflict between the speaker and his wife, but also acknowledges absurdity on the speaker’s part who ironically tells his wife, “your country’s pretty racist and classist,” and later claims, “the whole way i live my life is a protest.” The news article poems that are interspersed throughout the collection focus on odd bits of local news: “Forgets Child On Train,” “Horse Runs Wildly,” “Bridge Hermit Strangely Killed,” and “Parrot Laughs at Firemen: Four Fall into Pit While Fighting Blaze; Chickens Rescued” are just some of the headlines pulled from the collection of 1923 The Evening Bulletins and Philadelphia Enquirers.

Old News successfully immerses the reader into a specific moment in time, in a single neighborhood, complete with all its quirkiness, tensions, and strange history. And while Eckes concludes one poem, “we’ve heard this story before / like 600 billion times already,” there’s nothing tired or played out in this collection.

Read “into a film,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Ryan Eckes.

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In the poem “Phil–,” the speaker warns of the dangers of “focus[ing] on one thing / and mak[ing] it stand for every thing,” which is a good piece of advice for any reader of One Sleeps The Other Doesn’t, Jacqueline Waters long-awaited second book of poetry. The book, which is just over 100 pages long, consists of 14 poems–not including the poems-within-poem that appear in “Hello Due to Confusion: A Guard: II.” And while many of the poems are long, discursive, and paratactic, the book resists being easily summed up or captured in a brief blurb.

The poems often read as an extended conversation with one’s self, or perhaps with an other. In “Garden of Eden a College,” which was originally published as a chapbook from A Rest Press, the speaker claims, “my affairs / are just my questions,” and later in the poem a voice, perhaps the speaker’s inner-editor, parenthetically says, “These are all very good questions but stop / asking them.” And so there is a visible struggle in these poems–the reader gets to see the speaker thinking through ideas, expressing her doubts, and all the mess and contradictions that includes.

This is especially the case in “Garden of Eden a College,” where two characters, Jacqueline and Lampwick, appear and seem to be in a constant back-and-forth, tug-of-war, question-and-answer. Lampwick exists in opposition to Jacqueline and interrogates her. However, a strange slippage occurs in the back-and-forth and it can become unclear who is speaking. For example, “Lampwick this is not what you are looking for / or it is and you are totally embarrassed,” most likely should be read as Jacqueline addressing Lampwick; however, after so many of these exchanges and the strange way the characters constantly address each other by name, it is easy to begin reading it as one might a play, “Lampwick[:] [T]his is not…” Ultimately, it doesn’t seem to matter who is responsible for saying what, as the struggle between the two characters could easily be a struggle within a single, splintered self. This sort of shift in voice, or talking to or questioning one’s self, works well at the close of another long poem, “The Saw That Talked”:

How I can frame it aw I don’t know
cut-throat
Not that I feel that way
but that it appeals to me
to what
to feel that way

The “to what” in the penultimate line–the stutter, or hesitation, or interrupting voice–adds an interesting layer to the poem. Instead of the poem as monologue, we have the poem as dialogue.

Like “Garden of Eden a College” and “The Saw That Talked,” the poems throughout the collection easily lend themselves to multiple readings. The overall lack of punctuation can draw into question where one statement ends and a new one begins, and that is one of the pleasures of these poems. Another pleasure comes in the strangeness and playfulness in language, beginning with the weirdly wonderful enjambment of the book’s title. One poem is titled “Guard of an Eaten Collage: A Guard: I,” and the next poem is “The Garden of Eden a College.” “Garden of Eden” is preceded and followed by “guards,” which is explained in a fourth poem, “Somnambulism.” Written in two columns, “Somnambulism” reads like two separate pieces: one half reads like a performance piece that would fit alongside the imaginative blueprints for plays that appear in Jonathan Ball’s 2010 Coach House release, Clockfire; the other half reads as a straight-forward explanation for the poems that precede it:

I thought if my produc-
tions would not or could
not protect me, I could, at
the very least, protect my
productions. To protect
one production I imagined
especially vulnerable I pro-
duced other productions to
act as guards.

There are a number of lines that can be culled throughout the collection that speak to the act of writing itself, but if one were to draw too much attention to these statements, one would be in danger of focusing on one part and trying to make it represent the whole.

Throughout the book, the tone often comes across as flat or indifferent. In the opening poem, “A Ploy,” the speaker claims:

no emotion is pleasing!
each must be rejected
        replaced by an opposite
in turn rejected and replaced by yet another
strain of undifferentiated sentiment

There is also a sense of exhaustion: “Jackie I see / Lampwick I tire.” This exhaustion, or perhaps emotional remove, lends itself to wonderful descriptions that get at the strangeness of so many things people have accepted as normal in their lives. For example, “The Tax,” looks at relationships and the odd exchange of saying “I love you,” which “Begets an I LOVE YOU back, or it falters / As it its harbor / Fails to find.” And later, the poem looks at the structure of relationships:

…they are structures
These arrangements: living together
Sleeping alongside, staying awake while the other one sleeps. You have
To care! Be the sun
shining through a watery cloud, or the cloud
Creased to a white veil
Since where you believe you have power you don’t
And where you do you refuse to wield it

In the opening poem, “A Ploy,” “you” are instructed to reject your emotions until “you find your ways / have rearranged you slightly.” Although this rearrangement is not as extreme as Rimbaud’s idea of a complete derangement of the senses, Jacqueline Waters is definitely onto something here. This slight rearrangement results in unique descriptions and a worldview that gleans from a wide range of sources–from Jack Lemmon, to Apollinaire, to Linda Napolitano’s UFO abduction–however, the biggest source seems to be Waters own inner-self. This is an intelligent and well-crafted poetry that demands multiple readings. And it is a voice–perhaps a bit apprehensive and damaged by experience–that seems willing to express it all, even the ugly and cruel.

Read “Scissor Half,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Jacqueline Waters.

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The word hermit conjures images of isolation and retreat—a recluse living far away from society. And perhaps what is so surprising about Laura Solomon’s third collection of poems is that though it is titled The Hermit, it is full of life and connections, or at least attempted connections, with others. Throughout the book, Solomon takes on the roles of a world traveler, a truth seeker, and an emotional being set forth into the world, seeking companionship. However, the work also reflects someone who is deeply thoughtful and reflective—someone who perhaps despite her attempts for connections spends much time in her own head, considering her own dreams, desires, and relationship to language.

In “French Sentences,” Solomon writes, “I used to like words but now I hate them because I love them without reciprocity which means with every day I love them more and more because of hate // to comfort myself I take a lover but unfortunately he has a name which is another word for a word so constantly reminds me of my unfortunate marriage // this happens all the time to people so there is a word for it, prison.” This unrequited love of language is demonstrated throughout The Hermit, as the speakers of the poems seem to continually give and love openly, but are often left hurting or alone—left to their prisons.

Many of the poems are about a young American abroad, which adds another layer of alienation. The speaker is often at a remove from her environment, surrounded by languages that are not her native tongue, though she slips in and out of French and Italian with ease—luckily, for readers unfamiliar with the languages, Solomon provides a list of translations at the back of the book. Even with her ease with languages, the speakers are often alone, simply due to being American in a strange land that will never really feel like home. One rare moment where a character is unable to communicate results in a touching moment. In “From the Book of Comprehension,” a woman moves to Verona to be with a man, and though she learns Italian, there is no book on how to learn a dialect the man’s grandfather speaks. The woman and the man visit the grandfather, who is alone after the deaths of his wife and daughter:

the man and the woman visit the grandfather and plant for him a garden
the light is hot on the shovel as it blisters the man’s hands

the grandfather shouts and sweats and sits

the grandfather says something to the woman that she can’t understand
so he repeats it at a higher volume

he wants her to place the space on top of the barrel of water

the woman loves the grandfather and imagines the grandson as the old
man sitting under the tree

Solomon conveys a lot in that final line—it’s a tender moment, where the woman allows herself to dream of growing old with someone she loves. We don’t know what happens to the woman and the man, and though the book does have its moments of heartbreak and sadness, it’s moments like this that show something hopeful about the collection. Even if the day never comes where the woman can see the man older and sitting under the tree, she still experiences that radiant moment where she imagines it. It might seem a small victory, but it’s a victory nonetheless. “Feeling Sunlight” is another poem that gets at this feeling, describing the reawakening that occurs after one has been hurt or feels numb to experience:

the lungs ask a question the heart repeats
the nose knows more than it can say
the tongue tastes
the genitals wake
up

the mind believes again
it still exists

The poem ends with an image of a golden tornado, which perhaps refers to the sun mentioned in the title, but also hints at a destructiveness. Solomon writes, “there is nothing but this [referring to the lines above] / between / everything and the golden tornado.”

The lyric is the perfect form for exploration, and in her back and forth, repetitions, and contradictions, Solomon shows herself to be a master, expertly capturing what it is like to be human. “French Sentences” is a great example of this. The poem opens with an epigraph from Ted Berrigan asking, “Is there room in the room that you room in?” A New York School influence can be detected throughout the book, however is especially strong in this poem, with its conversational style and meandering sentences. In the poem, Solomon finds herself “thinking again after having decided not to.” There’s a natural ease as she moves from topic to topic, and the poem refuses to reach a conclusion—it can’t conclude. As Fanny Howe defines the lyric, it can only seek and ask questions and never settle or arrive, and this is precisely what is so human about it. Even though the poem expresses much melancholy, the reader is left with the knowledge that the speaker will continue to move ahead, and perhaps continuing is all that we can really hope for.

While the longer lines of “French Sentences” and some of the other poems recall James Schuyler’s prose-like lines, the complicated emotions and nuances in tone are reminiscent of another New York School poet, David Shapiro—who also happens to blurb this book, calling Solomon “part of a new visionary company that makes a photograph of exile, rhythm, and exaltation.” Also like Shapiro, Solomon demonstrates a range and playfulness of form, using question and answer in “Places,” epistle in “Hello, Nikola!”, variations of a tale in “The Stamp Collector & His Mistress,” prose in “The Autobiography of Alice B. Notley,” and breaking into song in “Tutti Fanno La Cacca Perché Io No.” Highlights of the collection include the longer poems, “French Sentences,” “Dream Ear, Part III,” and “Philadelphia.”

Overall The Hermit is a strong collection of poems, which makes me want to seek out the authors other work. There’s a charm to the poems that wins the reader over. The speakers come across as having big hearts and loving the world fully, and though this approach most-likely can only lead to heartbreak, we can’t help pulling for them. Though they have a keen understanding of loneliness, they perhaps best know what the opposite feels like too—as Solomon writes in “Philadelphia,” “everything / tastes better when it’s precious.”

Read “Like an Old Chest in a New House,” a a Rumpus Original Poem by Laura Solomon.

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***

I was a 17-year-old senior in Saginaw, Mich., when Boy Sets Fire released The Day the Sun Went Out on Initial Records in 1997. Angry for no real reason, I walked around with a chip on my shoulder like it was me against the world. Before, I’d flirted with alternative and underground music with no real direction or point of entry. It wasn’t until my junior year, when a friend introduced me to bands like Youth of Today and Minor Threat by copying CDs onto cassette for me, that music, particularly hardcore, became a central part of my life.

Though the Internet existed at this point, it didn’t to me; catalogs and zines served as my main source of information. Once a week I’d stop by Harmony House, the only place in Saginaw that carried the Metro Times, Detroit’s free alternative weekly. I’d look through the ads to find out who’d be playing where and spent weekends attending shows at Old Jamestown Hall in Saginaw or the Flint Local. Sometimes we’d head to Detroit to St. Andrew’s Hall, or Clutch Cargo’s or the Shelter (perhaps most famous as the setting for the battle scenes in 8 Mile). But my love of Louisville-based Initial Records began at Empire of One.

A short-lived skateboard shop in Flint, Empire of One hosted bands from all over, including many bands on Initial. And it was on one of their samplers that I first heard “The Fine Art of Falling,” from Boy Sets Fire’s full-length debut The Day the Sun Went Out. Lyrically it was a love song, but musically I’d never heard anything like it. Perhaps the poppiest song off of the album, it demonstrates singer Nathan Gray’s melodic voice, particularly a range I’d not heard in other hardcore vocalists.

Allmusic.com assigns the moods: angst-ridden, cathartic, confrontational, intense, passionate, tense/anxious to The Day the Sun Went Out, so it makes sense that my teenage self was drawn to this. However, the album also had a hand in my political-awakening. The songs cover topics ranging from abuse to sexism to war.

At a lull in “The Power Remains the Same,” my favorite track on the album, a voice rattles off: “homelessness, sexual violence, racism, sexism, homophobia, the system that creates them,” followed by, “I reject, I reject the system / I renounce, I renounce their values / I refuse, I refuse their standards,” and then Gray screams, “the system that creates them” as the song rips into a heavy breakdown. I found this music cathartic and energizing. When I listened to those songs I felt like I could do anything, and had a place to direct my aimless angers and frustrations. I realized my anger was justified because a lot of shit in the world was—and continues to be—messed up.

Boy Sets Fire released three full-length albums after The Day the Sun Went Out before disbanding in 2006, but I’d stopped listening not long after their debut. Because their music relates so much to a time and place, it couldn’t last long. I lingered in Saginaw longer than I should have. I dropped out of the college I’d enrolled in right out of high school and chose, instead of more stringent academics, a life of show going, hanging out with friends and just trying to have fun, all while I worked two jobs at the mall and attended courses at a community college.

Eventually I left that part of my life behind—though I’ve stuck with the political convictions. I’d heard that the owner of Empire of One drove his car through the store window. All my hardcore friends turned on one another, accused each other of “selling out,” scattered and eventually disappeared. The moment was over.

Boy Sets Fire actually anticipated this. In the liner notes of The Day the Sun Went Out, there’s a manifesto that opens with a quote from Norman Podhoretz (a surprising source considering the band’s socialist ideology): “The difficulty with youth movements is that youth is an unstable condition and nature its enemy; with each passing year you get less young and if you build a movement around youthfulness you’re dooming yourself to obsolescence in a very short time.”

The manifesto itself states: “hardcore is without question a youth oriented movement … it is unlikely that there will be many 50-year-olds ‘fuckin’ shit up’ or floor punching to the latest jigga jigga craze, however it is more conceivable that many of us will grow older, have children and attempt to live within a system that just a few short years earlier we were convinced we would rebel against.”

I don’t listen to hardcore anymore, preferring instead classic soul, Motown, traditional country and rockabilly, but every now and again I have a flashback—a line out of nowhere comes to me and I’m filled with an incredible energy.

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