Abracadabra, Sunshine

Most of the poems in Dexter L. Booth’s second collection, Abracadabra, Sunshine, are addressed to old lovers, friends, and family, and seek understanding amid the emotional complexities of adult life. Booth is a storyteller with elegant metaphors and references to mythology and the natural world, but what is most distinctive about his poetry is the way he juxtaposes seemingly unrelated images and events, while “attempting / to form an argument.” In “Love Poem,” a time machine and peppermint candy sculpture, as well as references to people burning Qurans, the Broadway production of Spider-Man, and the severing of a finger in a car door, all rapidly fill a short paragraph that ends with a line that can also serve as a caption for the whole poem: “There are so many definitions for separation, so few for belief.”

Separation is central for Booth, and many of these poems stew over relationships gone awry, with the speaker often drinking as he wrestles with the confounding need for intimacy, which only gets more complicated as we age: “Even after love / the body keeps stretching, is filled with things / that move.” These challenges grow heavier as the book progresses, and the desire for reconciliation morphs into one for redemption. The notion of sin also begins to color the poet’s perspective—“I like to think of myself as the ring / my body will leave behind, beads of scum / on the porcelain”—as he finds himself exploring mythologies of destruction and renewal, especially the Biblical/Classical flood. It is in this terrain that we come across some of the poet’s most powerful images: “Some truths burn // like houses and the people who run back into them.”

Many of the poems in this collection are quite personal, and as readers we don’t always know the full backstory between Booth and his interlocuters, which can at times make it hard to enter into the space of these poems. But Booth’s many references to familiar themes and images, and the way he relates these back to his own story, help universalize the struggle with human connection and loneliness that is at the heart of this work.