NOWHERE AT HOME

Poitevin’s first English-language poetry collection explores such diverse matters as life in New England, academia, and OpenAI/GPT-4.

“October leaves / pile up like scattered drafts of some design” the author writes in “Raking” as fall sets in, “aching on this byway to December...” Even so, he still has more in life to conquer, finishing the job with “my feet still two good inches off the ground.” The moodiness of academic life intrudes, as Poitevin, a mathematics professor, is annoyed by a shared office, pesky students, and Red Sox chatter in “Nostalgia for Quieter Times”; he longs for the halcyon days of grad school at the University of Illinois: “I miss your silence as mine rages, / beloved Alma Mater.” The poet writes with playful curiosity about philosophy and its relationship to his discipline, responding to Borges in “Divertimentum Orinthologicum” (“I start to prove that He does not exist, / but N being hyperfinite, I desist”). Hyperlocal concerns meet the great beyond in “Take-Out,” in which a mistaken employee thinks she has seen the speaker’s late father order lemongrass tofu (“I pondered / that lemony but sweet juxtaposition: / myself and my dead father’s apparition”). In “Beneath the Bedroom Skylight” Poitevin writes of looking to the heavens with his partner: “We peek / beyond Andromeda and dream a wolf / gazes at us with quasar-eyes and loops…” The poet writes beautifully of his Marblehead, Massachusetts stomping grounds, and his verses about landscapes and family churn with the energy of an unrelentingly curious and feeling soul. By contrast, he ponders artificial intelligence in “GPT-4 Responds to a Detractor,” in which the AI program derides the “arctic soul” of its human critic. Technical poetic innovation animates this collection; one poem is made up entirely of three-letter airport codes, another is about a cat genome, and a group of palindromes provides a brief, passing fancy. The careful way that he pulls meaning from the place he is in, and the family he has there, is in evidence throughout and makes this a cohesive and inspiring collection.

An impressive, eye-catching poetry collection unafraid to experiment and take risks.