The author explores trauma, memory, and mental illness in this body of poems. He begins by lamenting, “The years reveal a tally of losses” (“What Came After”). In his youth, Stewart moved to Chicago with his mother while his brother and father stayed behind in Dallas. Upon being evicted on one occasion, the speaker describes “the cover of nightfall, / my mother’s boyfriend backing a creaky U-Haul / into the front yard at dusk.” In “The Last Time,” he revisits “an unlit corner of the K-mart parking lot” where his mother suffered domestic violence. Drugs are a recurring theme; a speaker recounts visiting a doctor, completing a depression screening, and receiving a coveted prescription, though the cure may be worse than the disease when the drug becomes “a hammer claw / hacking through the cortex” (“Clinical, Part V”). Stewart deftly describes mental illness as “A lifetime of humiliations hoarded / in the hippocampus” (“Clinical, Part III”), “decades of wringing / over charred dendrites that carry the sour / smell of an electrical fire” (“Clinical, Part VII”), and the way “The amygdala scans / the living room for terror, and finds it” (“Clinical, Part VI”). The author’s visceral descriptions engage all the senses; he writes of “a late sun pooled on the skins / of new downtown skyscrapers” (“Dallas, 1978”), a “faux leather couch slicked with paste / of dried tears and body smells of others’ grief” (“Orange County”),and a mustachioed man with a “viscous” sheen, “like something dredged / from a dirty river” (“Being Good”). At times, Stewart verges on the verbose with lines like “Seven years of cautious agronomy / abandoned to a riviera of silt” (“Clinical”). But overall, this talented wordsmith holds the reader captive with his unflinching perspective.
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