Greeting Cards from the Edge

Detail from cover

If a greeting card's job is to express a purity of emotion that could never exist in the real world, then Rhett Iseman Trull's The Real Warnings, with its commitment to the impurity of emotion and relationships, is the best kind of anti-greeting card. Cards deliver holiday cheer without the stress of gaudy lights or strained budgets; offer regrets unmitigated by self-interest; express love without resentment, zits, or shared lawn care. They deliver emotions crisp and uncomplicated as the Helvetica they're printed in.

Enter Trull's debut collection, The Real Warnings. Its first poem, "The Real Warnings Are Always Too Late," is a troubled speaker's litany of transgressions committed against her parents:

I'll dominate the prayers you keep sending upLike the last flares from an island no one visits.For every greeting card poem, I will write fourto hurt you. Some will be true.

Indeed, throughout the collection, no greeting-card emotion—love, comfort, affection, congratulation— gets away without the patina of complication. Trull celebrates a newborn by protecting it from the world's "swindle and swoon" with a name that "startle(s), when spoken, / the bow of the mighty tongue." She pays tribute to a late loved one (including the gorgeous, Donald Justice-esque line, "The sky is the color of dirty rain, and nothing / flies in it") with an admission that "there will come a day...I'll fall asleep without tears, traitor to my grief."

It would be easy to concentrate exclusively on Trull's knack for storytelling and character, but that would do Trull's craft a disservice. This collection showcases Trull's linguistic and stylistic versatility: She is adept at creating cadence and even, at times, elegantly subtle rhyme. Trull, with her skill at rhythm and timing, transforms everyday, conversational words into jangling talismans. This is most evident in "Borderline, Promiscuous," the fourth installment in her series "Rescuing Princess Zelda" that tells of an adolescent in a psyche ward, where a diagnosis patters like the whisper of a drum: "We don't care / what the warnings say: borderline, promiscuous. May's quest / is our happiness." Likewise, in "Lotion Cigarettes Candles Wine," a grocery list becomes a metronome to heartbreak, and "The Streets of My Heart" uses end rhyme with dexterity.

Most of these poems fall together easily despite their stylistic and subjective differences, held together by a unity of voice and consciousness. In a few cases, like "WGA MEMBERSHIP DEPT RECEIVED" and "Your Dear John," experimentation with form begins promisingly but ultimately seems to fall short of its potential. The use of screenplay directions in "Your Dear John" begin interestingly with "FADE IN to flashback, the kind blur of hindsight" but begin to feel a bit too gimmicky by the second stanza with "Your hair in a tANGLE, ON / you write, bent over your desk...." Similarly, while "Introducing My Brother in the Role of Clark Kent" bends the Superman myth in ways that illuminate both our understanding of the titular brother and the oft-repeated Superman story, "Picked Up at a Party by Superman's Super-Hearing" doesn't reach quite as far. These missteps are slight, however, and they can't do much to compromise the energy and luster of the rest of the collection.

The Real Warnings is densely populated, not only by insomniacs, abandoned dogs, bipolar teenagers, grief-addled sons, suicidal guitarists, but also always, always by the parents, best friends, and unrequited lovers who orbit them. Trull renders each with the high-def clarity of a Wallace Stevens poem, navigating the tortuous pathways of injury and devotion like a true explorer. In "Heart by Heart the House," the speaker says to a spouse:

        ...remember the look        flooding your father's face thatmorning he discovered tomatoes destroyed        despite his careful fencing. What            could he do        but plant again        in the furnace of a new day's heat................................................        I want us        to die at the same time...