This is the “Age of the Bullet,” Matthew Lippman writes in Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful, days in which “bullets sprout other bullets in the bullet garden” and a caricature of a onesie-wearing president sucking on a pacifier appears on the cover of a national magazine. Lippman’s poems are wildly inventive yet grounded in the 21st-century dailyness of parenting and dinner parties and Dunkin Donuts, all of which serve as launch pads into perennial questions of mercy and trust. “I don’t care what you say about this city,” Lippman writes in the title poem whose images recall New York City in the days following 9/11: “We sit down together on the sidewalk / and we hold one another.” These are brash, beautiful poems, big-hearted in their tilt toward sentimentality and their yearning for something more, something better.

We Are All Sleeping with Our Sneakers On showcases Matthew Lippman’s characteristic humor, strangeness, and honesty at the peak of his lyrical powers. These poems embrace mess as an inevitability of authentic living and human interconnection.  Lippman gathers us into a bouquet. Picked from the garden and stems trimmed with the kitchen shears, maybe, but flowers all the same. In “The Big White American Segregation Machine,” Lippman narrates the moment when the partitions that maintain white cognitive dissonance collapse. He says to a friend, “Private education sucks,” but reflexive commiseration turns his gaze inward. “Then I realized I was a teacher. / Not that I was a teacher. / That I was a teacher in a private school.” He confronts, even as he does not solve, the way the collective delusion of the American Dream alienates us from sustainable living. “At some point in my life I wanted to be a firefighter,” Lippman reminisces. “So did the person next door and the stock broker / and the kid who punched the other kid on the playground. / I am sure of it.” Why such insistence? “It has to be true / because wanting to be a firefighter / is the only thing that keeps the world / from not being torn asunder / by flame, and ash, and an impossible, raging / heat.” In delineating the psychology of nostalgia, Lippman brilliantly reveals the fear of destruction and myopic sense of self-preservation that prevent us from leveraging goodness, from allowing combustion to clear the way for something better. “How does one change the culture, the mind culture, the heart culture?” he asks. “How does that happen? / More flowers? / More iced tea? / More ballet and modern dance? / Maybe more oboe and piano.” In the end, the strength of Lippman’s poems comes from the sincerity of their questioning and his willingness to muster an answer despite the world’s surplus of doubt and despair. “Hello kindness,” this poet tries again. “I am here and I want to hold your velvet hand / through the dark movie theater with the sticky, crunchy floors.” If that is all there is, it is mercifully enough.