Even before I read the poems in Someone You Love is Still Alive, I heard reports from shootings in schools and malls, in nightclubs and the bases of armed forces. I remembered hearing stories from survivors of natural disasters in reports on radio and television. I remembered how buildings like the Twin Towers in New York City fell. I remembered the death of Prince. I remembered the crumbling of the Roman Catholic Church under the sexual abuse claims against priests and bishops. I remembered the death of my dad, the death of my first marriage, the death of a dream that would never be. They were just too painful to remember. I am not sure how to make sense of these events whose presence has become a fixture in my memory.

Don’t worry. Someone you love is still alive, I imagine being told as I stand behind the yellow tape, as things lie broken, crumbled, and in some cases dead on the other side. Is it a cause for despair or hope, an elegy or pure tragedy?

What do we do when shards of reality lay at our feet, from which we can no longer shield our lives?

It seems as though Ephraim Sommers wonders something similar. He writes, “[t]hey don’t matter / I know, but don’t you, too, overload your skull full / of metaphor when there is no other way to fathom / all that is dead in the world? No right way to hold them / in these many-branched bones, my friends.” These words stand in the middle of Sommers’ poem, “When They Said Atlas Held the Earth Upon His Shoulders.” There is a resonance in these words with an epigraph from Brecht that Sommers uses to introduce the poem: “What kind of times are these when to talk about trees is almost a crime / because it implies silence about so many horrors?”  

In this fierce collection, Sommers sets the stage for readers to begin to make sense of all the things that cause us to want to turn our heads away and close our eyes. In his work, Sommers turns our heads back, and opens our eyes. For instance, in “While America Mourns, I Write a Letter to My Sister,” Sommers opens readers’ consciousness to the mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. We are made aware of a man who drove his truck through the house of a woman, in the name of love. The shootings in Aurora, in Orlando, Parkland, Ft. Lauderdale, Las Vegas. In the same poem, our eyes are opened to racism and rape. Toward the end, Sommers writes, “Do not think / I do not hear, daily / the language of dirt / urging me down root-deep / forever…. Yet, my wife for me / sometimes on the porch / with her tangerine toes / is a big pair of bourbon sunglasses / and when I look / through those lenses, / the breath / of the Earth goes / green and quiet / behind me…”

This is the first poem in Sommers’ collection. I’m glad for its inclusion, and its position. If poetry is going to whisper healing and wholeness into the horrors, then certainly this is the place to begin.

The lines in this poem are short and tight. The poem is not broken into stanzas, but is itself one long stanza. This is not the only time in this collection in which Sommers makes this craft choice. I appreciated the breathless quality of the poem, the confrontation of collateral violence in its many iterations and forms stacked one upon the other. At the end, and in the same breath, there is a faint sense of hope. “…the Earth goes / green and quiet…”

Sommers also uses other forms—the sonnet, couplets, and tercets, and hybrids among them—to set the stage and table so that readers’ eyes are opened to the realities among us. In “Love Sonnet (Broken into by America) in the First Year of Our Marriage,” Sommers uses the sonnet form, broken by white space after every line, to interlace the story of the narrator’s first year of marriage with statistics from that year in America. It begins, “[p]olice shot and killed 1,165 Americans in 2018. / 5,000 American veterans committed suicide with a gun in 2018. / My wife blowing invisible love notes across her noodle soup…”

Alcoholism, marriage, religion, and violent epidemics unleashed are among the things Sommers writes around in this collection. But because this is poetry, maybe the larger question and not only the specific descriptions deserve our attention. I wonder around the warmth of metaphor amid “all that is dead in the world.” With this collection, Sommers invites us together, to hear and describe the horrors of our lives, as Brecht calls them. He invites us to draw courage and encouragement from one another, not only because of the horrors, but because, as his title declares, someone you love is still alive. At the heart of the sentence, and our communal healing, is love.

– Paul Lutter