No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man

An ordinary clarinet becomes something sinister when the sound of its “reedy absence” tells a child he is safe—for now—from his abusive, clarinet-playing father. To find a sustaining music in elaborations of silence and absence is the method of Tobias Wray’s grave, rapturous debut collection. 

       Loss leaves behind
invisible shadows, knowing the unseen
prefers to stay hidden.

Memory loss is sometimes an effect of abuse, the mind’s way of healing from great trauma, and silence can be an evasion of meaning, like the Enigma code, and Alan Turing’s successful evasions of its evasions. But such erasures can also present a mortal danger. A central figure in Wray’s book, Turing was the father of the modern digital world and a martyr of queer desire who was sentenced to a humiliating silence that ended in suicide:

Turing broke every code,
unexploded a thousand ships.

Then, guilty of being 
decrypted.

Wray critiques these imposed absences, knowing that “meaning is made from the telling,” but he respects their emotional valences as well. In the riveting opening poem “All the Grand Deaths,” he doubles down on silence to evoke the little death that occurs when a gay boy comes out to his mortified father: 

Scene: A father and son driving.
    MAN:
    ME: Yes, I am.
    Car stops.
    MAN: 

Although many of these poems are about his upbringing in the South and Midwest, Wray invokes a wider culture, queered and personalized, to undo the coercive silencing of otherness and childhood abuse, finding his exemplars in the great moral stylists of poetry, from Dante and Donne to Luis Cernuda, a precursor of queer sensibility. The result is eloquent work in which silence is not an evasion of suffering but instead foregrounds the experience of it, creating a space for beauty to sing “in the center of great incomprehension.”