Within the pages of “Dynamite,” the reader will find a collection of poems that explode with emotion as Anders Carlson-Wee’s speaker experiences love and loss off and on the streets of America.
The first poem in Carlson-Wee’s chapbook is titled, “Dynamite” and speaks of a childhood game he and his brother used to play, where everything they threw at each other was dynamite. They would hurl everything from pine cones to choke-chains at each other until they were bruised and bloody. He ends this poem by saying:
I say a hammer isn’t dynamite.
He reminds me everything is dynamite.
Carlson-Wee turns this last stanza into the thesis of his chapbook, showing his readers through a series of poems that every encounter in one’s life leaves a lasting impact. Carlson-Wee backs up his claim by writing about everything as common as a photograph, to something as catastrophic as a flood and showing readers how each instance affected his life.
These pages are filled with the skeletons of those long ago lost, but not forgotten. Carlson-Wee writes as though their ghosts are whispering in his ear; his words occupy a space somewhere between reality and those he has lost. Carlson-Wee writes about the nursing home he grew up visiting his grandmother at but now, years after her passing, as he hitchhikes down Country 19, he can’t help but feel drawn to the lot where the nursing home once stood:
The woman asks me where I’m going
And I say as far as you can take me,
But as we pass the old folks home, I tell her to pull over.
He organizes his poems to tell a story. Each poem is plucked from the days Carlson-Wee spent hitchhiking or bumming rides on freight cars and is filled with the people or places he met on his journey. By the time readers reach the final destination, they will know every screw, every rail, and every nail that built the track of Carlson-Wee’s journey and where it lead him to”
It’s not about suffering. It’s not about fear.
We must peer out the *owl’s eye.
—from “Riding the Owl’s Eye”
Carlson-Wee swings from word to word, doing the poetic monkey bars; every word and phrase has a purpose and is connected, such that each poem hits the reader like a stick of dynamite.
*”circular hole on the porch of a Canadian Grainer train car, in which a train hopper car can ride in concealment” (Carlson-Wee 27)
About the Author: Anders Carlson-Wee is a 2015 NEA Fellow and 2015 Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellow. His work has appeared in Narrative, New England Review, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, Blackbird, Best New Poets, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading series. Winner of Ninth Letter’s Poetry Award and New Delta Review’s Editors’ Choice Prize, he holds an MFA in poetry from Vanderbilt University.
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