Eggtooth

The dedication of Eggtooth, Jesse Nathan’s debut collection, is a big one: “for love.” Those words cover Nathan’s chief subjects, his lifetime of loves—affection for a rural Kansan childhood, lessons in erotics with “a boy even stranger than I was,” an artist’s ardor for his current home of California. For Nathan, those words surely trace back to “The Good-Morrow,” by the English metaphysical poet John Donne:

For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.

Nearly every poem in Eggtooth remodels the stanza (etymologically, the “room”) of “The Good-Morrow.” A top-heavy seven-line assemblage, something like a half-sonnet, Nathan’s stanza caps four long lines, rhymed abab, with a chiming triplet:

my mind, you hardly
   seem to be.
On days like these.

It’s an unlikely, century-spanning borrowing—sponsored, apparently, by Donne’s ghost, who counsels Nathan to “use me like an eggtooth, break // the shell that shields you.”

If Donne “makes one little room an everywhere,” Nathan makes everywhere fit into his intricate rooms. His Kansas poems itemize local idioms—“A voice insists manure brings flowers / but also the more you stir it, the more you stink”—and dignify minor moments with word-painting, impasto-thick: “a blue cat / mewling, sticking to me, always sticking / like a burr on my sweatpants.” Nathan’s triple-rhymed cadences make him an unusually melodious and affirmative elegist. “I’m nine, taking mama’s hand,” he recalls in “A Country Funeral,” which ends in wordless intimacies and unbridged distances: “When dirt raps the casket, she squeezes / my hand. It aches for reach.”

Eggtooth ends in San Francisco, but its coda, “This Long Distance,” listens back to Nathan’s roots: “when / Sunday’s here he calls his kin.” Eventually, Nathan’s parents let Kansas do the talking, holding up the phone

                         to let him hear
  the call — so personal and clear —
of the train out there.

Nathan gives the book’s last word to that passing train “call,” which reciprocates his own call home from “many states away.” It’s a tuning fork of regional sonorities, but it’s also the original “call” to poetry, still singing out “personal and clear,” no matter how long the distance.