Buck Downs, exit style

 

nothing left to refund

      did you ever try
      to fix yourself

            and find out
      that doesn’t work

a purchase that looks
      like you found it

it shakes my whole body
like a chuck full of wood

Thelatest from Washington DC poet [and above/ground press author, I should add] Buck Downs is the self-published exit style (2025), following NICE NOSE (2023) [see my review of such here], the chapbook-length GREEDY MAN:selected poems (Brooklyn NY: Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks, 2023) [see my review of such here], OPEN CONTAINER (Washington DC: privatelyprinted, 2019) [see my review of such here] and Unintended Empire: 1989-2012 (Baltimore MD: Furniture Press, 2018) [see my review of such here], amongmultiple other titles. Composed as seven cluster-sections of short poems—“shyboy,” “illucidations,” “little wages,” “’patacoustics,” ““For Bleachers”,” “thisis not to say” and “exit style”—Downs’ has long been engaged with observationalthinking, but one that provides a sense of continued, ongoing andinterconnected meandering. “your dream should have / an exit plan,” he offersin the poem “sleepervescent,” “clinging / to the rock / of emptiness // returnto dust / no other places / can I go / but where I come to [.]” His poems arecomposed as self-contained sharp moments, of wisdoms and self-aware questionsand clarifications, that accumulate, even build, in a finely-tuned lyric acrossa perpetual engagement with the surrounding world and life’s possibilities. “I spreadout / in my body / til I could feel / my presence / in every cell,” the poem “apiece in a pinch” offers, “the pressure / of cell on cell / compounding // it’sa find-me puzzle / I can’t quit matching [.]”

Thebrevity of Downs’ poems can be deceptive, almost obscuring, in plain sight, justhow smart these poems really are, and have become over the years he’s beenworking, and almost set themselves in that space between knowing and unknowing,perpetually between dreaming and conscious thinking. There are echoes here ofthe observational language first-person movements of such as American poet William Carlos Williams in Downs’ short, clipped lines, or even certain elements of thework of Vancouver poet George Bowering and American poet Robert Creeley, oreven the ghazal of the late east coast poet John Thompson, as Downs offers hisown sequences of meditative response-moments in a particular, ongoing cadence,each poem set as its own kind of thought-sentence. Or the poem “this is not tosay,” that writes:

      I know something
      I thought I knew
      before and how

            like knowing
            that the clock
                  is wrong
            but still you
      can’t tell the time –

      there was dope left
      for safe keeping
in a place where nobody
      would think to look,
ever – and later found
            by someone
      who wasn’t even
      trying to find it –