Noah Stetzer, “I Could See Needing a Knife” (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016)

I am not going to lie to you, dear reader, this collection will require you to be fully present. With each layer of the speaker that is revealed, you will shed a layer of yourself. This revealing will bring you knee to knee, eye to eye–two bodies recognizing one another as cosmic dust.

What do we allow to confuse this empyrean understanding of one another and of ourselves?

we’re what they call

a two body problem, it’s like double planets but I was out there

at the far end and what you didn’t know but I did: that the stars

are far apart that far and with my hearing stretched as far as I could

there wasn’t a whisper, not a murmur, not even static that I might’ve

called something more or even evidence of something more.

Illness compounds time and time is the gatekeeper of our relationships. Noah Stetzer’s poems chronicle the constriction and dilation of understanding. They elevate in lieu of masking. They witness in lieu of reshaping reality into comfort. And these pieces come together to teach us about the fortitude of the human body.

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