It's Good to Hear From You
A series of epistolary poems capture connection, distance, and the ever-present chance that a miracle might come in the mail.
Review by Aarik Danielsen
Most evenings around 8:00, I walk or run alternating routes through my neighborhood. Center-city streets, Collegetown, Midwest, USA.
Over the past year, I’ve noticed regular company along the way. Mail trucks driving by—in greater numbers, at later hours. I silently hope they’re ending a long day’s run, headed to settle into the post office a mile east of my house.
Like poet Matthew Olzmann, I believe beleaguered messenger gods—or maybe God’s messengers—guide these vessels, ferrying prayers from one place to another, delivering faint echoes of the divine voice sealed with Forever stamps. I imagine Hail Marys passed between estranged parents and adult children; expressions of eros from a lover to their distant beloved; a borrower preaching through their plea for jubilee, addressed to the one holding their debt.
In Constellation Route, his new collection of epistolary poems, Olzmann underlines our great need to connect across zip codes and other barriers. We write letters, knowing we still have so much to say; we open mail because there is no shortage of messages we need to sit with—till we love the sender as ourselves.
Olzmann’s speakers address letters to William Shatner and a “52-Hertz Whale,” rope bridges, river monsters, and “a Man Drowning in a Folktale.” Communication being a two-way street, Olzmann sends himself mail from fellow writers, a North Carolina traffic light, and that state’s ancient pines; he even self-addresses a telepathic note from a flock of pigeons. The letters arrive in varied tones: amusing, curious, sarcastic, cautionary. Often they settle gently, like guiding spirits. Nearly every poem spells out the desire to tether through recollection, repair, or refining a bond.
Whatever the message, something formative occurs when an envelope is sealed or torn open. Olzmann frames correspondence as a creation myth in the opener “Day Zero.” To the degree that people command the small corners we call ours—flipping on lights and calling them good—our words make and remake worlds. He writes,
This is no
Genesis, which starts on the first day. More like
a dress rehearsal, the day before. Day Zero.
The letter is in the mail. When it reaches you,
everything begins.
Olzmann’s poems also address cycles no less powerful for being innate. “Letter to Bruce Wayne” considers missed connections, how easy it is to lose sight of one another. “A good place to hide a man is among thousands / of men,” Olzmann writes, nodding toward the Bruce Waynes you might find in Houston or Pittsburgh, Tampa or Flagstaff before ever reaching Gotham City and our ostensible hero. “Letter to the Person Who, During the Q&A Session after the Reading, Asked for Career Advice” negotiates the other side of this cycle—connection made—as Olzmann’s speaker throws an arm around young shoulders before rappelling a list of potential jobs. “You need to follow your passion / as long as your passion is not poetry and is definitely a huge fund,” he writes wryly.
These poems represent the ultimate example of writing someone a letter, then locking it away in a drawer.
Perhaps everything we do resembles a letter; even waiting in line at Comic Con offers the chance to compose with an eye toward connection, one poem demonstrates. We will never exhaust what must be said and heard, so Olzmann’s epistles lend shape and language to what we inherently do—or know we must.
And they soulfully broker conversations which so often cause us to flinch. In poems such as “Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czeslaw Milosz” and “Return to Sender,” Olzmann posits how we might live in light of how we are dying. The former comprises a searing lament for American school shootings.
The classroom of grief
had far more seats
than the classroom for math
though every student
in the classroom for math
could count the names
of the dead
he writes, stealing any remaining breath. The latter forms a quiet elegy, a reminder we eventually return to our source, whether God or “the earth, that immensity / where everything changes, buzzes, is alive again and— / Amen.”
Olzmann intermittently interrupts his correspondence to honor the Postal Service. Poems about the first colonial post office and phantom routes lend mail-carriers near-mythic status while parting the curtain to show how mail is sorted and sorts us. Some poems offer ideas too exquisite for even certified mail. An early dispatch staggers with the line “Wisps of static, lamentations of rain.” And to open a letter bearing the query “What did God do before the invention of the American Midwest?” means encountering a question without an answer—but one deserving semi-permanence, entered by the sender into someone’s record.
Letters Olzmann sends himself on others’ behalf reach beyond what we know how to do. He models lacing up someone else’s shoes to tell yourself everything they need you to hear. These poems represent the ultimate example of writing someone a letter, then locking it away in a drawer. Only here, all is yours: the drawer, the handwriting, the unburdened message. And, out of humility and necessity, the letter is unsealed to read at any moment.
Late in the book, Olzmann writes a “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now”: part apology for the beauty we ruined, part-apologetic for the transcendence we knew despite ourselves. I imagine someone opening Constellation Route like an attic-swallowed bundle of letters fifty, even one hundred years from now. Beyond a few outdated pop-culture references and rightful apologies, I believe they’d find the pages like mirrors.
They might encounter their own need to hear and be heard, might understand why mail vessels—whatever future form they take—keep running. And they might be moved to sit and scrawl someone else’s address. Because with every letter comes the chance for a miracle, a hope expressed, as a letter Olzmann sends himself from the poet Cathy Linh Che closes:
I’ll never be a saint.
I won’t die for anyone,
not the way religion has taught me,
not the way Prince has sung.
All I have are the words I’m writing to you,
which I hope, friend, are good enough.
Aarik Danielsen is the arts and culture editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri. He writes The (Dis)content, a regular column for Fathom Magazine, and his work has appeared in Image Journal, Plough, Split Lip, Rain Taxi, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal.
Constellation Route was published in January 2022 by Alice James Books. You can purchase a copy here.
