THRESHOLDS

Rogers shares a series of poems about impermanence.

This collection of lyrical poetry offers musings on nature, relationships, and endings. He opens with “Reef,” a reflection on love that toggles between the complex beauty of the ocean and the inevitability of losing a beloved: “I can hold you, but not hold you back,” he writes. In “Vireos,” he considers how words can salvage hope, but also betray, and how silence can be a language all its own. The fragile, ephemeral nature of love and the tension between connection and distance are the foci of “Letters,” in which the speaker meditates on a relationship of mutual longing in which “We / taunt each other like granite cliffs, both of us unreachable.” “Transit” explores the fleeting nature of existence—how all that one does is destined to fade into obscurity in an indifferent world: “Imagine how we’re invented but replaced—our chronicles, our / fables swept away with us.” “Beginning Again” is more hopeful, even as it highlights the repetition of life, suggesting that happiness is infinitely renewable in nature and in love. Recounting another’s misfortune in “Outpost,” a speaker tells of a young man who traveled to a remote Arctic post without an exit strategy. The man basked in the beauty of the spring and summer months, only to find himself starving and barricading himself against bears. Ultimately, the man died by carrying out a death plan detailed in his journal; his solitude, which was appealing at the start of his adventure, meant that there was “no one to hear his final words or touch him in the gray October light.” By the book’s close, it seems that Rogers has surrendered, too, writing, “All right, have it your way: I ask for no tomorrow” (“Gifts”).

Rogers’ contemplative style blends lyricism with philosophical meditation, making this an emotionally intriguing and intellectually stimulating collection. The poet vulnerably explores loss, as in a poem about a deceased sister. Rogers is astute when it comes to scene-setting: “I drowsed behind wooden blinds, cradled by / viscous heat. The gray-green slats swayed to and fro; their / silhouettes inched across the bed” (“Reef”). His connection to the natural world is visceral and immersive in lines such as these from “Reflections”: “We slip from the dock. / Floating with the clouds, our bodies drift on blackened glass, / reflections among reflections.” Other lines expertly evoke the exhilaration of love, but he also deftly navigates the gray area between two people: “Heart of stone, I called you. If only we could love each other / now in that silent, hopeless way, stone against stone, light / against light.” However, the dense nature of the poetry’s philosophical themes may make the book inaccessible to more casual readers. Other works are so abstract that they require multiple readings to wager a guess at their meaning: “The metaphor droops and wilts; the actual ocean snips their / dwindling hooves. // The only tendons here are ours, rebounding to the gun-smoke / of freedom” (“Nightbreak”).

An introspective and occasionally esoteric collection that invites contemplation.