Poets and Poems: Chris Dombrowski and "Ragged Anthem"

Reading Ragged Anthem: Poems by Chris Dombrowski evoked the strangest feeling, and I’m not exactly sure why. Whether the poems were about time, or geology, or nature, or an old (and unsolved) murder, or a boy catching a tree frog, or St. Francis of Assisi, a thought kept recurring. And it was that life is fragile, and the fragility is giving way. But this is happening in the face of a personal resiliency; an irresistible force may be meeting an immovable object, and something will change.  

This began with the very first of the 52 poems in the collection, a poem entitled “Gentle Reader.” The narrator rents a room; he plays “Unaccompanied Suite for a Stolen Violin” in his head over and over until someone next door punches the wall, and still he won’t turn the volume down. He and the wall puncher eventually have an eyeball-to-eyeball standoff the at the spyhole in the door. And after reading the poem three times I think this narrator, this poet, is fragile, things are coming unglued, and he’s in a standoff with the chaos right outside his door.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.