Like the poems it contains, The Takeaway Bin as a whole is a response to something commonplace; one might even say it’s a book of copings with or responses to life.
I’ll give it this: I’ve never read poetry inspired by a card game. It’s fitting that The Takeaway Bin, whose poems “reply to various daily dilemmas, specific or obscure,” came about because of an obscure but unremarkable pastime called Oblique Strategies. Like the poems it contains, the collection as a whole is a response to something commonplace; one might even say it’s a book of copings with or responses to life. I cracked the cover expecting poems that would be relatable, accessible, and familiar, and on that score the collection succeeds. A nonexhaustive list of items appearing in the poems includes birds, girl scouts, buses, sectional sofas, courage, ears, television, ex-presidents, slang, plankton, malice, “Count Your Blessings” (as sung by Bing Crosby), the National Guard, bigots, borscht, goggles, and, finally, a bed. Mirosevich meditates on these everyday items and turns each one into a character, a prop, or a backdrop in her poetry.
Like the things you might find in a lost and found, the poems’ topics are mundane. I read expecting that the poet would take these items and, through her poetic attention, revitalize them and give them a particular shine, like a seasoned antiques dealer who picks up pieces from estate sales. Yet most of the poems leave their topics dull and smudged, which was a jarring letdown. The poems are generally not beautiful. They’re stuffed with so much wordplay that coherence and rhythm falter and give way to bulk “cleverness.” It takes only a few poems (or stanzas, for those with low tolerance), for this overstuffing to become irritating.
Exhibit A: “The Worst.” There’s the collection’s signature overabundance of wordplay in phrases like “Go instead for the jugular; juggle your options like oranges.” Jugular, juggle, options, oranges. That’s not so bad, right? It’s even a little fun.
Now imagine it going on, line after line, through the majority of the book’s poems. The wordplay, which includes many, many bad puns and double-entendres as well as assonance and alliteration, quickly stops being fun. Instead it seems childish, frustrating, and amateurish. “The Worst” continues to a small story of childish jealousy and violent impulse stopped only by “the bluebird / bylaws,” and I wondered at how easily Mirosevich turns the juicy, vibrant experiences and emotions of a really good childhood hatred into a casually tossed-off phrase, capped with the painful line: “Who knows, your worst may be my best, or vice worse-a.” There’s a sense of being thwarted (or perhaps constipated) that the final pun can’t disguise. The story is cut off so abruptly that I was left with a sense of futility and confusion that clashes badly with the poem’s jaunty tone and wordplay, which, incidentally, comes off like an eight-year-old hooker: begging to be noticed in all the wrong ways. I finished the poem—and this is fairly representative—with the feeling Mirosevich had just stepped on my toes.
Which isn’t to say there aren’t portions of the collection that are interesting and well done. The last two stanzas in “Bird Peck, Wind Whip, Limb Rub” stand out early in the book:
I let a rotten apple
through and was fired even though I promised to do better. Like
The kid who penned the note I found on the beach, I will be good,
I will be good, written 27 times down the lined page, I fear my
future couldn’t look more unpromising.
In the first of these lines Mirosevich finds the perfect words to show the speaker in a grinding circle of poverty, tyranny, and hopelessness, an adult world where a single and unimportant mistake means the end of a livelihood. Her promise to do better makes the scenario desperate, and in the next line she crisply extends that desperation to include a child who is introduced with the ominous combination of a day at the beach and penance for a general lack of goodness. Unlike “The Worst,” whose hopelessness come from poorly executed cheerfulness and has more than a bit of disdain as a byproduct, “Bird Peck” shoots its hopeless ending like a missile. These stanzas show a determined and purposeful Mirosevich who seems altogether different from the author of the preceding stanzas, and from the book at large.
Along with these stanzas, there are whole poems that make me suspect a sober collection of Mirosevich’s poems that dropped eighty percent of the wordplay would be magnificent. “Holey, Holey, Holey,” which is a meditation on the uses of absence, stays relevant, hits the note of flippancy she misses through most of the poems, and ends with a strong and evocative challenge to “downsize to a hole in one.” The golf term has of course been corrupted by preceding references to holes meant to release “all we contain”; to be a hole in one becomes an image of releasing or giving away everything. The philosophy is off-set by a pleasant brazenness that pops Jesus and the stigmata into a playful aside, and the poem balances carefully between depth and jauntiness.
In “Holey” and a few other poems (“Human Flaw,” “The Takeaway Bin”) Mirosevich shows that everyday things and ideas are worth at least a rummage now and then, because there are occasionally treasures. Much of what I found in The Takeaway Bin was so disjointed and self-consciously playful that it was difficult to enjoy the higher quality poems, but that’s perhaps appropriate to the book’s aesthetic and inspiration.
