Open your mouth. Your tongue,

put it out. Let it wait.

This is how Zach Czaia’s second collection, Knucklehead, begins. The first poem, “If You Would Understand What Happened on the Road to Damascus,” commands the reader to open the mouth, the tongue, the hands. Czaia’s opening poem starts with the imperative to wait and to receive. It invites the reader to keep her eyes closed until she has tasted and held these poems and heard the voice beneath them. It’s a voice she recognizes yet cannot place right away. She has to wait to understand, to take it in, and to try, even when “you are left with why?”  Having waited and listened, finally she is told: “only now open/ your eyes.”

Czaia, who has worked as a teacher for fifteen years and currently teaches English at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, had his first book of poems, Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota) published in 2015. Coincidentally, I have taught at two Cristo Rey schools that are part of the same network in which Czaia teaches, so his poems are especially resonant for me. But they can speak to anyone who has tried to teach someone else something and then learned more than the student, for anyone who thinks about the ways the world can instruct us. Czaia’s second collection is about love, justice, gifts, privilege, blessings, and brokenness.

With free verse and metered verse, with Dantean influence (as in his first book), Czaia’s collection presents a character, “Knucklehead,” on pilgrimage. The collection is divided into three parts, and while they are not exactly the inferno, purgatorio, and paradiso of Dante, in a way they each contain all three. Many of Czaia’s poems speak from the voice of the “Knucklehead” who shows up mainly in the second section, reflecting on what he knew and did not know when he started teaching, as well as all that his students taught him. Yet Czaia has also given us poems for our current times, writing about the pandemic lockdowns, about loss, the murder of George Floyd and Minneapolis’s way of grappling with it.

The three sections could also be seen as a movement of understanding and gaining wisdom. It starts when the knucklehead didn’t know that he didn’t know. Then, he recognizes all that he doesn’t know. And finally, there are some things he knows that he knows when he has arrived at the third section, but he has also gained enough true knowledge to realize that there is much he still doesn’t understand.

One of the poems in the first section is called “Dante! Dante!” and the speaker says, “I didn’t know to hunger / for my wife / because I hadn’t met her. / […] I was a teacher and I knew nothing / for myself / so I taught you, / Dante.” Here he acknowledges several ways of not-knowing, the kind that often marks young adulthood. By the end of this section, readers have the first introduction to this speaker calling himself “Knucklehead” in the titular poem. Here, he says, “I’m still reaching / for something lost when I left teaching / If you find it, Knucklehead, finish my poem / And tell me how your life has come home, / and what you grieve and do not grieve, / and all you love and do not leave.”

This moves the reader into the second section where “Knucklehead Learns a New Word.” In these poems, he is reflecting on his experiences teaching and the sacred ground he did not know he walked. The speaker insists, “I didn’t / understand how holy it was, what I was doing, / holier than the masses I attended.” Later on, he admits, “Now I can’t remember anything I said.” He learns privilege and humility in his first year of teaching; he learns that the world is wide and he is small, though that does not mean he is insignificant (nor is any person). These poems are filled with a sense of perspective and of beatitude. “Knucklehead” goes over what he tried to teach and what he learned instead—that there is blessing in being a peacemaker (“Kunchlehead’s First Fight As a Teacher”), in mourning, in being children, in being someone children can trust.