Every Thing I Say I Miss The Point: A Poetic Memoir

Seemingly cobbled together from old notebooks and stretched over many years, Everything I Say I Miss the Point is a poetic memoir that chronicles a descent into alcoholism. Blending confessional poetry with self-elegy, and voiced in projective verse, these poems are an attempt to balance the lyric with a sense of poetic trajectory, of reaching towards a buried self that has become hidden by other, malignant personas. These alternate personas, or exagerated aspects of the self, manifest themselves unbidden as the narrator swings between drunkenness and sobriety. Henri is the boss, the one the world usually sees and the one who thinks he’s actually in control. Mr. Bourbon is rather self-explanatory and knows exactly who’s running the show. These poems act, in a sense, as the evidence that a true self exists underneath and is hiding somewhere within the words scribbled on pages and stacked out of sight. Purposefully fragmented, often disjointed, and at times repetitive, these poems act as manifestations of how the alcoholic negotiates with his family and his own disintegrating sense of self.