Doom Scroll

In 2020, the Oxford English Dictionary included “doomscrolling” among its “Words of an Unprecedented Year.” Matthew Guenette converts the now familiar gerund into a compound noun in his fourth collection, in which each poem assumes the shape of a slim, centered column. The titular poem deploys more of the pandemic vernacular we all know so well:

: The curve flattens as shampoo gets in
your eyes.
            You sip a quarantini in your
jammies.
 
            Watch Scrubs reruns you’ll
never watch again.
            Listen to an ’80s mixtape.

Guenette toggles between second person and first, and it’s clear that the speaker/addressee is decidedly, if not comfortably, middle class: “You have the privilege of a / mortgage. You’ve mortgaged the future / with your privilege. There are at least six / different kinds of jellies in your fridge.” Some poems are more pointed in their evocation of the subject as a stressed, fortysomething parent:

            A part of you thinks you can still steal away, start an over-forty punk band, scream songs that answer the important questions like, Do you know how much these swim lessons will cost?

In poems like “You Sound Like Your Mother,” everyday moments are vividly rendered (“When those kids crashed their / bikes into your trash bins, it sounded / like the drums from “In the Air / Tonight”), but narrative snippets that mimic the ephemerality of online stimuli best serve this book’s form:

Then a story came on the radio about the latest school shooter. The kids wanted to know why that happened, why that man did what he did. I was afraid to guess, and I stayed that way, until the kids got distracted by an old cheetah print onesie and tried to put it on the cat.

The ease with which the kids’ potent question dissipates is testament to this fractured moment in the United States, since it points to distractibility as both a necessary coping mechanism and also a privilege, one afforded to those who hold on to the illusion that gun violence, while everywhere, is nevertheless elsewhere at any given time.