Past Lives

In Past Lives, each line leaps to the next in glorious unpredictability, forming a latticework of surprise. In the world of V. Joshua Adams, we have competitive knitting, beer commercials, cabriolets, and mandolin players breaking ukulele players’ fingers. To employ a Pavement title, Adams’s poems are ＂slanted and enchanted＂ their surrealist strangeness is sometimes meditative and sometimes mercurial with acrobatic associative jumps. These are poems of wit, inquiry, and sonic vigor that examine issues of being, textuality, and the imaginative act. Past Lives is ＂swift-winged and sharp＂ and ＂darkly bright＂ as its sentences spin with wryness: ＂Even the language of ruin gets run-down,＂ ＂The question filled me with dread, / which was better than nothing,＂ and the following excerpt, from which the title Past Lives arises: ＂A lot of people have past lives they are covering up. / For example, I was once an Episcopalian.＂ Though Adams’s poems aren’t overtly emotional, he extends his antennae into a range of consciousness including desire and darkness; or, to use a phrase from Mark Doty, they are a ＂logarithm of decay and rekindling.＂