Gabriel Hart on Stephen J. Golds

For Days 22 and 23 of the Cruelest Poetry Month, Five-Two alums Gabriel Hart and Stephen J. Golds' commentaries on each other's collections, to be published by Close to the Bone April 30. Here's Gabriel on Steve's collection Love Like Bleeding Out with A Gun in Your Hand. —Gerald So

This will be Golds fourth book in eight-months — a maddening pace of prolific napalm between novels and poetry, we’re tempted to wish he’d slow down so we can absorb it all. But when someone is on fire, it could be arrogant to assume they want to be extinguished — especially when they’re the one holding the match. If there’s one thing the pandemic taught us, is that tomorrow is never guaranteed — it’s almost crazier not to write all your most intimate shards of your charred shadow-self out as fast as you can. In many ways, there’s a gun to our head, our mortality ever creeping.

To those who do have a hard time keeping up with Golds, he’s done us a solid here with Love Like Bleeding Out… — it’s a collection of stories and poems mainly published online along with some new pieces, so we have them all at out fingertips in one place.

We’re seeing a further refinement in Steve’s poetry here, a steady maturity since his debut collection Poems for Ghosts in Tenement Windows I Thought I Saw Once from last November. Where in those pages we were gifted the intimacy of a barfly’s thoughts at last call most wouldn’t have the courage to share, here we see a man opening himself up even further — reflecting on his misspent teens that might have influenced the domestic dystopias of a severed marriage, while struggling to maintain a sound fatherhood.

In “Walls” we are not so much a fly observing there as we are buzzing around the carcass of separation, the bleak disintegration moving him out of the family home he helped build. Suddenly, the whiteness of bare walls is more frightening than the dark. It’s the last moments of the husband and wife, the children safe at the grandparents, so anything can be said — though nothing will ever be enough. It seems there can be no redemption here, until the man moves out to his own apartment, watching his two daughters settle into the new digs: “Our daughters plant seeds in small pots and giggle together/Dirt kissing their fingertips and sunshine caressing their long hair/I wipe a tear away quickly and swallow a bittersweet happiness/before they can catch it with their glittering eyes/Now I’m just living for the time I can be with them/like this and they’re free from/our constant, stagnant, gangrenous warring as though/we were the children in the family all along/and we’ve finally grown up and/left home.”

It’s not all musings on the past though — in “Prescriptions,” Golds strives for ultra-presence, solving the expiring effects of modern medicine: These pills, they don’t work/They kill me, resurrect me into/a walking fragment of memory/half-remembered on/a Sunday morning/They ask if I’m taking my meds/I seem tense, they worry/I want to say that/being tense/is better than/being past tense.” Brilliant. —Gabriel Hart