Winter Stranger

Winter Stranger, Jackson Holbert’s debut collection, begins with a succession of endings—a death (“When we travel / the dead travel too”), a departure (“I left that town / forever”), and an art form disappearing:

                       I drew

everything we did
to the trees,

everything the trees
did to us.

I drew it badly
and spent years trying

to draw it well. Eventually
I stopped.

How best to summarize that final, slammed-shut sentence: A recognition of one’s capacity for change? The flummoxing victory of a habit finally kicked? An admission of defeat, a recapitulation of what Holbert calls “the long failure / of my youth”? All these arcs surface and recede in Winter Stranger, a book written in the frazzled aftermath of addiction and the losses of family and friends—including the dedicatee of this poem, “For Jakob.” In poetic address, Holbert finds a haywire communications device, a paradoxical technology for reaching the dead and reminding them they’re slipping away: “I am not done / with you, you who further whiten with each winter.”

Succinct but uncommonly far-ranging, Winter Stranger crafts a pliable style from an amalgamation of sources—Denis Johnson, Pacific Northwest punk, small-town Hitchcockian horror: “Every night a hundred crows / perch on the power lines and scream.” Its stranger achievement is the fashioning (or warping) of a sense of time unique to American poetry. Holbert’s titles sketch a universe where everything happens far too often or not enough: symptoms recur like seasons (“Another Summer Withdrawal Poem”); necessary words never get said (“Unfinished Letter to Jakob”). Holbert’s narratives hinge on catastrophic change, but the word he pronounces most tragically is “stay”: “When the pills entered my life / I knew what to do, but I didn’t / know what to do when they stayed”; “the stale snows stay all season.” (Hear “stay” buried in “stale”?) Few debut poets have such a clear-eyed sense of how much—or how little—their poems can do for them:

            I can make it all sound so beautiful.
You’ll barely notice that underneath
this poem there is a body
decaying into the American ground.