Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2017. 72 pages. $14.95.
The biggest hurdle of a séance is forfeiting control of what we conjure. In his debut collection, Bad Summon, Philip Schaefer clears the table, lights a candle, and accepts that whatever may come must take on a life of its own. Like a séance, Schaefer’s debut is unpredictable. What is summoned is sometimes filthy, sometimes electric, and—more often than not—foaming at the mouth.
Bad Summon is vast, wild, and from the land. The poems called forth come from the other-country, the back of the skull, that mental landscape where magic and environment intertwine. It isn’t enough to exist in Schaefer’s world; readers are expected to help chart the terrain. In the poem “I’m Keeping the Wooden Horse,” the land eludes our desire to categorize it:
Lately we speak of
moving to a country we cannot name. We stick pins in the map
like star holes and let the cartography of our bodies decide
between pleasure and snow and what’s the difference.
Schaefer’s debut relies on the blur between things: snow and pleasure; “dream logic and / a revolver”; the world as it was and the world as it is now that he’s summoned his poems into it. His poems offer surprise in a land long without it. But where there is surprise there is distortion, too, things circling the rim of the void from which they’ve been conjured: “Metal / comb, shower rod, lamb’s hair. The trees crawl through the / window after the wind licks them dry.” How can anything remain the same after we’ve reached through the ethereal static? Short answer: it can’t. Like he says, “How subverted this perversion, this other version we become.”
What we become is afraid—in some cases—of the things we can’t control. And in that rests the paradox of Schaefer’s debut: we’ve created this world, and now we have to find a way to exist in it. The summoning Schaefer practices is a product of an environment where we can’t ignore “The amber alert crawling // through our backyards.” In his poem “Evening News,” he explores the effect broadcasted fear has on us; we watch the bad news and “hold the bedspread // to our necks and pray / for less evidence, for // safe and endless water.” Like Schaefer, we already know the end of the story: they will fish a body out of that water. Unlike the fast-paced, ever-evolving, no-good-news world around us, the magic of Schaefer’s poems do what they can to prolong our hopefulness. But in the end not even they can escape the threat of a violent world:
A gas station clerk
found with his neckboiled red in the register.
All for a night of lightheads. The football team
record resting on the armof a boy who is addicted
to the way he feelsafter midnight, recently
acquitted. Some moveto be alone,
to be commonand replaceable
by mountainsides.I hold on to myself
like a grenade.
The anonymity the land provides can be appealing. But like Schaefer’s speaker admits, it isn’t hard to lose yourself in the openness. It isn’t hard to lose yourself to boredom or to booze or to drugs. It isn’t hard to be built for exploding, like the speaker admits he is. Schaefer forces his readers to consider how one might hold on to oneself like a grenade. Of course, for him, there’s more than one way: it all depends—in the end—on whether or not the pin has been pulled.
More than anything, Schaefer’s debut feels a lot like the uncovering of tracks once covered, of revisiting past transgressions as a way of dealing with the little demons inside us. In a haywire world, the things we turn to for relief often wreak havoc on our lives and bodies. In Schaefer’s world it is no different. In poems like “Barbiturate Talismania” and “Overdose,” readers understand how easily drugs hijack the direction of our living. In the latter poem, Schaefer’s speaker leaves the hospital after doctors are unable to paddle his pal back into the world; he returns home and smashes his “television like a bag of ice on the kitchen / floor and drove unfathomable swords into [his] own quiet / electricity.” It isn’t just the “you” and the “I” that partake in the pleasures of momentary pain relief and escape. In his poem “Eventualities,” it is apparent that the whole community is complicit in this overconsumption:
A kid without teeth
runs through the bushes,
pretending his hands are firetrucks. His mother’s eyes
turn to glass each afternoon,two moons slow to orbit,
and I know when she reachesfor the mail she often forgets
who he is. Don’t we all.
In Bad Summon, everyone at the party has multiple amnesias. It’s how one survives.
Likewise, the story of Bad Summon is a conundrum for the twenty-first century: how to stay close to the land while far away from the human world. Nature is central to Bad Summon; it is the one constant and static force. It isn’t like us, temporary and disposable. Schaefer’s debut discourages readers from forming a desire to be remembered because, after all, the land won’t remember us. The most beautiful moments in the book take place away from the arena of our bad decisions, away from the people we hurt and the people who hurt us in return.
Schaefer’s séance is an effort to reach through, to make contact with all we’ve lost and all we’ll continue to lose. Bad Summon is an exploration of the desire for communication, while—at the same time—examining its cost. How hard it is for humans to assume the role of medium. How hard it is to open the gate to a new, unexplored ethereal plane. This debut collection unveils the cohabitation between the conjured and those who do the conjuring. In “The New World,” Schaefer says,
There are galaxies of hurt
and in each one of them we become masters.
We crawl up the throat of the sky like dying
animals and beg heaven to let us in.
Well, reader, welcome to the new galaxy of hurt, where we sic and summon, where we poke ourselves with needles and cause each other pain, where Schaefer exposes us for the voodoo dolls that we are.