River Octopus

Just before leaving America, the speaker of Paul Christiansen’s River Octopus works his final shift at a Wisconsin liquor shop: “customers move down aisles selecting / companions for picnics, Packer parties, poker games, / birthdays, weddings, wakes, moments of tremendous / sadness and terrible happiness, hours spent waiting / for tomorrow to emerge like a lit coastline through fog.” The rituals of daily life likewise preoccupy the poet in his adoptive home of Vietnam, where he observes butchers, ice makers, and other street vendors with an outsider’s vast, solitary yearning. Whether driving the landscapes of his native Midwest, surveying the visual cornucopias of Saigon’s public markets, or traversing the populous waterways of the Mekong Delta, the poet seems to be haunted by a question he poses early in the collection: “What if this is the world doing the best it can do?”

Ultimately, Christiansen’s “subtle and searching poems urge us toward an understanding of self if we are to brave the wild uncertainties that surround us,” series editor Patricia Smith observes. “There is still beauty in our bewilderment, our feelings of smallness and helplessness, and River Octopus brings forth that beauty with an additive meld of driving narrative, crisp languaging, and unerring sensory detail akin to a photography of words.”