{"id":5665,"date":"2022-06-08T16:21:09","date_gmt":"2022-06-08T16:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=5665"},"modified":"2022-06-08T16:22:21","modified_gmt":"2022-06-08T16:22:21","slug":"knucklehead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2022\/06\/08\/knucklehead\/","title":{"rendered":"Knucklehead"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Teaching to Learn<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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A poet and teacher reviews a new collection following the adventures of a \u201cKnucklehead\u201d learning to learn, even as he sets out to teach.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Mary Grace Mangano
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Open your mouth. Your tongue,<\/em><\/p>

put it out. Let it wait.<\/em><\/p>

This is how Zach Czaia\u2019s second collection, Knucklehead<\/em>, begins. The first poem, \u201cIf You Would Understand What Happened on the Road to Damascus,\u201d commands the reader to open the mouth, the tongue, the hands. Czaia\u2019s 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\u2019s a voice she recognizes yet cannot place right away. She has to wait to understand, to take it in, and to try, even when \u201cyou are left with why?<\/em>\u201d\u00a0 Having waited and listened, finally she is told: \u201conly now open\/ your eyes.\u201d<\/p>

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)<\/em> 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\u2019s second collection is about love, justice, gifts, privilege, blessings, and brokenness.<\/p>

With free verse and metered verse, with Dantean influence (as in his first book), Czaia\u2019s collection presents a character, \u201cKnucklehead,\u201d 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\u2019s poems speak from the voice of the \u201cKnucklehead\u201d 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\u2019s way of grappling with it.<\/p>

The three sections could also be seen as a movement of understanding and gaining wisdom. It starts when the knucklehead didn\u2019t know that he didn\u2019t know. Then, he recognizes all that he doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t understand.<\/p>

One of the poems in the first section is called \u201cDante! Dante!\u201d and the speaker says, \u201cI didn\u2019t know to hunger \/ for my wife \/ because I hadn\u2019t met her. \/ [\u2026] I was a teacher and I knew nothing \/ for myself \/ so I taught you, \/ Dante<\/em>.\u201d 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 \u201cKnucklehead\u201d in the titular poem. Here, he says, \u201cI\u2019m still reaching \/ for something lost when I left teaching \/ If you find it, Knucklehead, finish my poem \/ And tell me how your<\/em> life has come home, \/ and what you grieve and do not grieve, \/ and all you love and do not leave.\u201d<\/p>

This moves the reader into the second section where \u201cKnucklehead Learns a New Word.\u201d In these poems, he is reflecting on his experiences teaching and the sacred ground he did not know he walked. The speaker insists, \u201cI didn\u2019t \/ understand how holy it was, what I was doing, \/ holier than the masses I attended.\u201d Later on, he admits, \u201cNow I can\u2019t remember anything I said.\u201d 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. \u201cKnucklehead\u201d goes over what he tried to teach and what he learned instead\u2014that there is blessing in being a peacemaker (\u201cKunchlehead\u2019s First Fight As a Teacher\u201d), in mourning, in being children, in being someone children can trust.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Open your mouth, your hands, your ears, and wait. Only then can you open your eyes.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Knucklehead\u201d also moves beyond the classroom and learns lessons from a hospital bed, from marriage, and from what cannot be understood. In \u201cSouth Minnie is the World,\u201d he tries to see \u201clight in shadow\u201d in the words written across his city: Black Lives Matter, Say His Name, I Can\u2019t Breathe<\/em>. The speaker says, \u201cThey shared those words so the world can see. \/ On the street where he was murdered I walk free. I feel shame \/ I can\u2019t package into a post for friends to see.\u201d<\/p>

The final and third section in this collection moves into a space where the speaker tries to grapple with the \u201cafter\u201d and move forward. The poems challenge us to take stock of where we are currently and even look to the future. The poem \u201cPrayer for When The City Opens\u201d asks, \u201cWhen the city opens, is there something \/ this citizen will know now that he has \/ not known before?\u201d In the middle of the poem, the speaker prays, \u201cOk, Still Small Voice, talk to me, \/ tell me how to be now in this new broken city.\u201d Towards the poem\u2019s conclusion, he appeals to God, saying, \u201cTell me, \/ Teacher, how to be a little one when the city opens every \/ door again.\u201d This seems a fitting way to think about what Czaia\u2019s collection asks when it arrives, after a Dantean journey, to the new city. The poems in this collection, especially in the final section, call out to God, and ask how to be a teachable little one. The poems\u2019 speaker prays to understand what he did not know before.<\/p>

As a teacher and poet myself, I felt a personal connection with this knucklehead. I\u2019ve been like him, in the front of a classroom, humbled by what I haven\u2019t known that my students had to show me. I\u2019ve stared down a blank page, or at my own hands clasped in an empty pew and felt my own smallness. Right before the pandemic, I remember walking to my subway station after a full day of teaching and thinking, \u201cI never saw this life for myself, but God did.\u201d He knew. Czaia\u2019s poems in this collection are like that moment: looking around at life, especially the life of a teacher and writer and pilgrim, and simultaneously aware of the grandness of the divine vision and also faced with the little step I\u2019ve been given to wash every day, as O\u2019Connor says in her Prayer Journal<\/em>. This collection asks how to be when our task to love right where we\u2019ve been placed is both very small and insurmountable.<\/p>

Although these poems don\u2019t offer an answer, readers will find a companion for their journey in Czaia\u2019s \u201cKnucklehead.\u201d And when they\u2019ve reached the collection\u2019s end, they would do well to remember its beginning: open your mouth, your hands, your ears, and wait. Only then can you open your eyes.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Mary Grace Mangano <\/strong>is a writer and educator having taught middle and high school English in Chicago and New York City. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in <\/em>America magazine<\/em>, Dappled Things, <\/em>Presence, and others. She currently resides in Philadelphia and is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. You can find her website here<\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Knucklehead<\/strong> was published by Nodin Press on October 12, 2021. You can purchase a copy here<\/a>.<\/em>
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A poet and teacher reviews a new collection following the adventures of a \u201cKnucklehead\u201d learning to learn, even as he sets out to 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