Constellation Route

“I too, look at the world / trying to find the one thing that makes sense,” writes Matthew Olzmann in the title poem from his third collection, Constellation Route. In these mostly epistolary poems, Olzmann addresses, among others, William Shatner, a whale, a canyon, other poets, the Roman Empire, the thoughtless person who etched his initials in the oldest longleaf pine in North America, in the effort to find

a connection among incongruent paths,
recognizable shapes made by disparate points of light.

Olzmann’s approach is direct, unpretentious, deceptively literal-minded: a subject is broached—Comic Con, unicorns, a younger version of himself—and made to render its meaning or its absurdity. In “Letter to the Person Who, During the Q&A Session after the Reading, Asked for Career Advice,” Olzmann displays an easygoing yet pointed wit:

When we were younger, guidance counselors steered us
toward respectable occupations: doctor, lawyer,
pharmacist, dentist. Not once did they say exorcist,
snake milker, or racecar helmet tester.

Somewhat plaintively, he reminds his questioner, “When they tell you about the road ahead, / they forget the quadrillion other roads.” 

As befits a poet who admires the “other roads,” Olzmann’s inventiveness can be exuberant. For example, he takes literally a United States Postal Service term for an addition to a postal carrier’s satchel, “wing case,” to find something lovely and affecting: a “seraph” removing his wings and laying them in the case “the way a musician lays down his guitar.” 

In Constellation Route, Olzmann’s imaginative leaps become his way of combating despair over the purpose of existence, the state of the nation, and the intractability of race relations, as when the speaker delicately tells a seven-year-old who may soon suffer from “mixed-race anxieties” of the salamander he got as a child:

Some have gills. Some have lungs.
Some have neither and have evolved
to breathe forever through their skin.