The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a book-length sequence of 53 poems with identical eponymous titles. Heartbreaking and searingly lucid, this debut collection from poet Matthew Tuckner chronicles his best friend’s illness and subsequent death from cancer. Its brilliance is not only in recognizing the vastness and particularity of grief -- how the loss of a beloved is so personally all encompassing that it splits time irrevocably, separating our personal history into distinct eras of before and after as the governing principles of our lives crumble -- but also in joining the discrete experience of one person’s sickness to a carcinogenic imperial core, the late-capitalist global order that ensnares all people in toxic landscapes that make us sick.

Describing a trip to Japan, Tuckner evokes the brute force of appetite alongside the delicacy of life as he recalls ＂memories of its greedy koi fish, a ceramic bowl / of goji berries perfectly balanced on a tree branch.＂ Beholden to a ticking clock, we catalogue, becoming evidentiary and encyclopedic in our impulses. ＂We fatten the time until it bursts into artifacts: / sixteen photographs of a single puddle // taking shape in the red glow of your darkroom.＂ In borrowing the title of Edward Gibbon’s seminal 6-volume history, Tuckner anchors the associative detours of his sprawling intellect and executes a stunning metacommentary on his own lyrics: time collapses every era into a spattering of sentences, tyrannical as it forcibly converts the present to the past, and yet the barbarous recursion of human feeling resists oblivion, evoking the eternity of emotional significance. Tuckner’s shrewd balance of irony and tenderness make this cerebral inversion possible: this friendship is the poet’s canon event, the Rome at which every road in his mind arrives, and yet it is also the singular dialect that will not cede to death’s subsuming lingua franca.

Damien Hirst’s taxidermy art, The John Keats House, superfund sites in Rome, NY, the 2023 Ohio Train Derailment, a children’s book titled Oil Spill! -- these poems travel widely in their topics to understand the specific ravages of disease on the human body, and in turn, the ravages of human beings on the planet. Its trenchant criticism isn’t pessimistic, though -- its redemption is the restorative, unending love that made these elegies possible. Equally gutted and mesmerized by our infinite, arbitrary ability to discern meaning in mess, these poems ask us to bear witness to what we can develop if we will sit in the darkness. To read the photo essay of a storm’s aftermath. It tells an ancient story that becomes brand new, the one about ＂a puddle you glimpsed the moon in & stopped for. // A puddle that was just plain rain until it fell.＂

Matthew Tuckner received his MFA in Creative Writing at NYU and is currently a PhD student in English/Creative Writing at University of Utah. His chapbook, Extinction Studies, is the winner of the 2023 Sixth Finch Chapbook Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Adroit Journal, and Best New Poets, among others.