“Midnight Sunrise” by Joseph Kerschbaum

Kerschbaum renders the ordinary unordinary—if not the domestic terrifying— in poem after poem. Masterfully written and organized . . . a major accomplishment.

Various tornadoes, casual brilliance, pale darkness, the monotonous beautiful—Joseph Kerschbaum’s full-length poetry collection Midnight Sunrise, forthcoming from Main Street Rag in Spring 2024, lives up to the contradictions of its title.

Set somewhere in the vast flat midwest in the hazy, faded fog of the seventies (“What You Save on the Way Out of a Burning House”), Kerschbaum renders the ordinary unordinary—if not the domestic terrifying— in poem after poem. Benign suburban danger (“Ghost in the Graveyard”) seems to lurk around every turn of the page with climate change high on the list of threats. As the seasons warp a fraction of a degree at a time, (“The Acrobats)”, the narrator is painfully aware that he is among the “Invasive Species”: 

Gripping their green

throats, my gloved hands  

hack & slash 

until the weeds uproot.  

Toss their spindly bodies  

in the compost.  

Spoon-feed them  

back to the earth.  

If these viny interlopers 

were the narrator, 

I would be the murderer,  

the evil ogre  

who returns each spring  

to eradicate their offspring.  

This is a sensibility that . . . isn’t related to moths / but . . . understands skimming the flame . . , a voice that seems to have been granted a second chance to answer the question How long of a life is long enough? (“Renascent Sequence”).

But not everyone here seems to have gotten another chance or lived a long, satisfying life. Ghosts dissatisfied with their lot waft through these poems like the recalled smell of burnt popcorn and elephant dung from last summer’s big-top circus (“The Acrobats”). Literal and/or figurative fires erase houses, families, and histories into little more than rubble. 

Everything, in fact, is seen through a lens of danger (“Here and Gone”); anxiety marches like a terrible parade through these poems, and I am unable / to be nothing / but overwhelmed by them (“Year of Firsts”).

Listen to the subtle, restrained music of passages such as the following excerpted from “The Acrobats”:

. . . They snap 

free of gravity &  

somersault tumbling through  

the air with our collective gasp 

held, braced for a missed  

connection or misplaced hand 

outstretched to catch no one 

because they already  

dropped.  . . .

These are lines as well-manicured as the proudest suburban lawn, as consistent as rows of corn, but honed with a wisdom that has:

. . . learned 

manicured lawns 

are the byproduct 

of pushing back 

against the world 

that wants to grow wild. (“Weed Garden”) 

Formally-speaking, then, there is a sense of spaciousness cropped into neat tight frames. The poet is also a discern curator of the deep image: Baby blue shag carpeting (“Ghost Story”), Sabbath & Skynyrd (“People Only Remember the Burning”), both Miller Street (“Jamais Vu”) and Miller Lite, and a mother’s 

. . . beehive hairdo  

rising out of frame,  

holds a cigarette  

in one hand & a baby  

cradled in the other arm.  

“What You Save on the Way Out of a Burning House” 

“Scars Where Nothing Happened” masterfully organizes two similar but disparate scenes into one astonishing poem. “Renascent Sequence” tells its moving story in reverse chronological order with perfect clarity. The entire collection is masterfully written and organized and, taken as a whole, a major accomplishment. There is not a single poem that does not further and deepen the poets’ concerns and the book’s themes, so that everything leads up to the inevitable sense that, as Robert Frost put it, "the final poem is the book itself."