Colorado Review

colorado review 184 Though the prose is often highly detailed, one never comes upon moments where this imaginative energy obscures clarity or ease of reading. Instead, time is collapsed at just the right moments and expanded when necessary. Phrases like “forgotten flying” and “mud-left eggs” deliver a certain freshness to the prose. Readers are absorbed in great anticipation of what might come next, both in this language and in plot. It is easy to recognize these stories as tremendously big-hearted illuminations of fatherhood in whatever imagined landscape it might exist. The sacrifices and compromises the fathers make in these bleak, post-apocalyptic circumstances illustrate the trials of fatherhood without regard to time, and in this way the novella transcends its dystopian placement. Each story is remarkable when read alone, but when fashioned into a novella, a sort of magic occurs. There is the distinct sense that though all is malformed and decaying, eclipsed by rubble, Cataclysm Baby still has its stories to tell, the pounding cadence of its characters’ hearts to be finally known. The Book of What Stays, by James Crews University of Nebraska Press, 2011 reviewed by Michael Martin Shea The Book of What Stays, James Crews’s debut collection and winner of the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in poetry, is a narrative of coming to terms with one’s self, and despite the title, its focus is just as much on what gets left behind. For the poet, this development is rooted in the speaker’s growing acknowledgment of his own homosexuality, a thread that orients the overarching narrative: the collection progresses from the book’s first poems, which find the speaker exploring his sexuality in secret, hidden from his wife, to the final section’s unashamed examination of his new life with his partner. Along the way, Crews deftly navigates between what is kept and what is tossed aside, though not without remorse, as seen in “Looking Back,” in which the speaker imagines leaving his wife: Didn’t Lot too, just once more, want not only to look back, but also to return to the arms of his lost wife, that 185 Book Notes metaphorical salt? Didn’t he want one more kiss, one last taste to see him through the rest of that endless desert, now alone? It is this sense of longing for what cannot be that marks the best of Crews’s poems, a fidelity to people and objects that are inherently transitory. Despite a pervading sense of fatalism, Crews attempts to cast honest shadows of reality in his work. In the book’s first poem, “Palomino,” he sets out a poetic manifesto : “I tried to remember / this was an actual body standing just inches / from mine. I didn’t want to forget the way description / often does.” This actuality of the body, not withered into mere description, gives Crews’s poems their urgency, but what is remarkable about this collection is the cast of bodies that populate Crews’s verse. While the majority of the poems focus on the speaker’s own sexual awakening—his interactions with various men, guilty encounters with his wife, and final sense of fulfillment—Crews shows his versatility in adopting various other voices along the way, borrowing heavily from both classical myth—the collection features two Orpheus-themed poems —and European history, as in “Leonardo, Lovelorn in Santa Babila,” which finds Leonardo da Vinci mired in his alleged relationship with Salai (though no longer merely alleged). Elsewhere , we find Crews adopting a didactic stance in his poems, as in “A Beginner’s Guide to Ice Fishing,” in which the journey of self-discovery is transposed onto a nameless you; nevertheless , we can hear the speaker’s central struggle for identity in the lines: The moment the line goes taut, pull and lift the long pike—his body slick with metaphor—out of the colorless depths he writhes to slide back into. The crowning piece of the collection, however, is Crews’s long poem “One Hundred Small Yellow Envelopes,” which in twenty sections takes as its subject the Cuban artist Felix Gonzales-Torres, focusing not only on his work but also on the death of...