Libretto:: Nightstand

Michigan poet Jack Ridl has created a wonder of a book. If, as they say, God is in the details, the selections in broken symmetry glisten with the divine. Every small item – and Jack chronicles lots of them in his poems: collections of salt and pepper shakers, Vs of geese, broken windows, a spray of violets sent from France during World War II – shines with significance. Jack’s specificity forces us to pay attention to the complexity of overlooked things, taken-for-granted things, as in his “The History of the Pencil,” reminding us of the simple tool crucial to all this writing stuff in the first place. Jack doesn’t just write about toast, but toast with jam – currant jam. On a plate not just a plate, but a chipped plate. Painted with a half-moon. At its center. In the hands of someone less masterful, less controlled, such incessant accretion of detail would amount to annoying linguistic disposophobia. But Jack guides us to look – at egg timers and piles of television sets, his gone father’s old shirt, cheese curls, the honeysuckle in the back yard – the way mathematicians view a shoreline. Measure the edge of each grain of sand along the coastline, and seemingly fixed distances become as they are: infinite. (Indeed, the poems are gently arranged around a trio of mathematic tropes: fractals, quantum theory, and differential equations.) Jack writes in the opening poem: “Only the broken reveals, gives / the universe its chance at being / interesting…” And when I finished the book and looked up from its pages, my tchotchkes and stack of newspapers and a subway token on the coffee table and the ailanthus umbrellas outside my window seemed suddenly dear, fundamental to the galaxies’ continued spinning, luminous as stars. Sarah Jensen