Past Lives - by V Joshua Adams (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In Past Lives, each line leaps to the next in glorious unpredictability, forming a latticework of surprise. In the world of V. Joshua Adams, we have competitive knitting, beer commercials, cabriolets, and mandolin players breaking ukulele players' fingers. To employ a Pavement title, Adams's poems are "slanted and enchanted" their surrealist strangeness is sometimes meditative and sometimes mercurial with acrobatic associative jumps. These are poems of wit, inquiry, and sonic vigor that examine issues of being, textuality, and the imaginative act. Past Lives is "swift-winged and sharp" and "darkly bright" as its sentences spin with wryness: "Even the language of ruin gets run-down," "The question filled me with dread, / which was better than nothing," and the following excerpt, from which the title Past Lives arises: "A lot of people have past lives they are covering up. / For example, I was once an Episcopalian." Though Adams's poems aren't overtly emotional, he extends his antennae into a range of consciousness including desire and darkness; or, to use a phrase from Mark Doty, they are a "logarithm of decay and rekindling."

-Simone Muench

Review Quotes

Adams has the right combination of world-weariness and thoughtfulness to guide the reader past frustration, disappointment, and sometimes resignation into a reduced, purified space for poetry. In his poems, we can laugh at the excesses of the past while preparing to build a sadder, truer world out of the ruins to come, or at least have a laugh that "even the language of ruin gets run-down," while memories of hips (an heiress's, maybe?) and artisanal bakeries in Columbus fly by, refusing to console us. An acquired delight.

-Jordan Davis

It's very cool, in this present life, to be able to attest to the intellect, importance, and unsuppressable humanness of Past Lives from V. Joshua Adams. These poems are written with a captivating sort of rapturous flatness, situating cultural history and discourse against a backdrop of clergy, cops, and the ordinary objects of the world. I'm so drawn to the singular strangeness of the language, the phrase "Missing the Forest for the Forest" and the toast "To the end / of the end of ideas!" One poem mentions the "dangerous thing" of "imagining a future as good as the past"; here's hoping we get a future as good as Past Lives.

-Natalie Shapero

Past Lives is mysterious and alchemical, it is the seaside floating away while eating a plate of mussels in the evening and listening to the shells drop one by one into "deep yellow bowls." The speaker of these poems is sophisticated, funny, sensual, and bewildered in a way reminiscent of John Ashbery. There is something gorgeous about the way Adams's "crystal bullet eyes" aren't just taking in the world, but capturing the world in flux, each moment brimming with imaginative excess. This book reminds us that our past lives are evershifting "ghostly canopies," that glisten when we give them language.

-Sandra Simonds