A Perfectly Ruined Solitude

Kristofor Minta’s debut, A Perfectly Ruined Solitude, is a book-length poem addressed to a fictive brother. This fact appears at the start—“There is no brother. He is only in my head”—but it is easily forgotten. The speaker, by granting himself the interlocutor he cannot find in real life, is able to articulate thoughts he might otherwise leave unvoiced:

All these people, brother, 
with their hearts made of leather—
I think they’re the ones who wrote history. 

Liberated from biography, he and we can wander through these poems unencumbered by fact. 

The title’s piquant contradiction, A Perfectly Ruined Solitude, acknowledges the solitude we (perhaps gladly) relinquish when we gain companionship. The intensity of each utterance creates an intimacy that lives outside the coded language of an actual relationship. 

Are you awake yet soil, black satin, awake yet,
rainbow of oil riding waves in the harbor?
Are you awake yet internet, blockchain, trainload
 of bastards?
Are you awake, brother?

Though we know the brother is notional, he feels no less real. 

The power of Minta’s language is achieved through concentration and privation. We explore a defiled terrain (“We are making an air / that costs money to breathe”). There is a wrestling with intimacy:

What if I touch her
and love is there like a silk net, 
like strange wire
through all of my days?

And there are moments of blank terror barely curbed:

It was less like kindness
and more like soil that was too dry
to accept any water at all.
It was more like a thimbleful of panic, a tall vase full of panic
holding a bouquet of panic blossoms.
In short, it was nothing. 

A contents page appears at the end of the book, retroactively splintering this long work into individual pieces. Still, the poem reads like a sonorous, mesmerizing monologue—wry and lyrical by turns, and unswervingly direct.