Book Review: Laughing Is Forever

Reviewed by Warren Maxwell

Confessional, sordid, roustabout, picaresque, romantic, misanthropic, the list doesn’t end. These poems are a thrill to read.

Diversity coupled with an unmissable voice make a potent brew of this forty-two poem collection. There are rambling family stories (“Lucia,” “In The Kitchen”), tales of wrestling with a fruit fly on a busy street (“The City Writhes”), and dreamlike reflections on life and the world (“Brighter Day”). This latter poem includes the memorable lines: “May god(S) bless us./I’m not trying to make a statement/men were made to hurt.” Raw, undeniable lines like this are peppered throughout, coming from somewhere deep within the poetic voice. 

There’s a weary knowledge, the fruits of persevering beyond the point of injury perhaps, that animate these stories. Each poem is a narrative. Even the opaque, aesthetic haikus have a story to tell. Their language is visual and visceral, moving from object to object without wasting time on ideas or ephemeral, not-quite-graspable descriptions. This is kinetic poetry that thrives on the sweat of life lived hard.

“Salted watermelon 

sittin’ on newspaper 

bluesmen spittin’ seeds”

Bukowski, Faulkner, Anne Sexton, Barry Hannah, these are just a few of the literary figures who stalk the pages of this book. Their names come up again and again (Sexton becomes a surprising object of lust in “Here We Are Again”), but so do their environments: the heat of Mississippi; the sleaze of late night drinking. 

The poetry itself works on many levels, extending from its propulsive motion to the depth of references to the sense of space and shape that appears on the page. While some pieces like “Found,” in which a man finds a message-in-a-bottle washed up on shore and decides to write a reply, seem forced into their shape (short, bitter lines creating a narrow horizontal trail that balloons at the bottom into a whale of a paragraph) others have an organic, writhing movement that compliments the jagged language. “Playback”slips from a series of tight haikus that from one side of the page to the other into a hybrid of the form—half haiku half monologue—that finds a strange malformed form of its own at the page’s bottom.

“Can’t appreciate shit till I’ve lost it all. 

Being here is somehow your fault. 

This loblolly pine will never die. 

Everything I do is failure. 

Our home is old but it’s new to you.”

There are misfires in this collection, as there are bound to be when a poet doesn’t hold back. But even these are enjoyable for the simple fact that this collection feels like a full statement of purpose from a mature voice. There’s nothing tentative about the poems, so when they land on a cliche (“window-lived life;” “Let’s never say goodbye;” “Who’ll let me drink in the morning/and shut up while I tell lies/about who I’m gonna be”) they land with a purpose, an intention that shapes the cliche into something not quite fresh, but still curiously true. On top of this, the three sections that structure this book (“Thank You, Jupiter;” “Life is a Funny Job;” “The Delving Day”) elevate their individual poems with the same energy and restriction good line breaks give a stanza. This is a collection of poetry wrought by the head and the heart.

Jogging from detritus-ridden, Bukowski-inspired free verses to Lowell-style observations of the inner life, this hardtack collection of poetry runs the gamut. A rugged, sinuous voice drives the free verse narratives contained in Laughing Is Forever. These mercurial poems surprise, thrill, and move in equal measure. They’re dying to be read. 

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