We Deserve the Gods We Ask For by Seth Brady Tucker (review)

The presiding concern of Tucker’s poems is a barrage of conflicts, spanning wide ranges of severity and circumstance, and the spiritual quest for their justification. We find the gruesome effects of war in the most extreme cases. A former paratrooper, Tucker exhumes personal accounts of bodies crushed under tanks, soldiers falling to their deaths, and other details from his service that echo into civilian life. Other poems focus on the turmoil of abandoned lovers, addiction, car accidents, self-doubt, and the reconciliation of faith in a god who “can never keep up” with us.

Tucker’s incorporation of animated characters and pop culture icons might be a pleasurable and fun addition for the reader, but it is also a striking commentary. The poems make it clear that from early childhood we are primed with exposure to violence. The demolitions incurred by Wile E. Coyote, fistfights of Popeye, and traitorous uprisings within Aquaman’s Atlantis plant the seeds for endless loops of failed quests, or short-won quests only to be undone the following episode. These cartoons, and other iconic figures such as David Bowie’s Major Tom, become a kind of preparation for military interests or the agonies of broken love. In adulthood, preparation turns to persona, as the speaker becomes his own version of a charred coyote, a beaten sailor, or a desperate ground control begging a space traveler to stay. They are all just as war-weary as they are love-weary, certain of the loneliness their former greatness has brought them.

Another reoccurring theme is the constant need for inanimate objects. In some poems they arrive as small as prescription medication pills or wedding rings, and in others grow large as supply tents and parachutes. What bolsters this theme even more is that nearly all of these desired objects serve as agents of assistance and, simultaneously, self-destruction. A truck of watermelons driving down the highway is “a year’s wages,” but also “the destruction of a family and a name” as the truck is overturned and scatters “the work of two hundred days…like broken skulls and seeping brains.” Elsewhere, the cigarette that gets one man thrown into an airport holding cell is paralleled by another man’s wedding ring. Both men find themselves equally imprisoned by the object meant to make them feel improved, and thus they are engaged in a mutual self-destruction because of it. (It is appealingly uncertain which character the poem “Hot Tarmac” is written for.) In other poems, a supply tent is refuge for both the living and the dead, and Hallmark cards offer tranquility only at the expense of the self.

It is easy for lines concerning the ever-looming presence of massacre and heartbreak to quickly become spectacle or overly sentimental, but Tucker does a formidable job balancing his turns so that the poems retain their resonance. A stranger in one poem is compared to a montage meant to erase her identity, (“…she is Prufrock, the Good Witch of the West, she is the smell of fried tomatoes, of shit…”) before we discover her true form: a lost friend from grade school who wishes “simply to be the first or the last / woman any of us will ever love.” Tucker’s penchant for the quirky detail, the blasé letter from god or ghost, is what reinvigorates his moments of surprise. The lines will often grow narrow in action or thought, then steadily billow, and then narrow again:

A simple and innocent quest for help

crackling its way past…girls who simply can’t get past the concept of speed and lift and metal and landing ever again. They all need things from me that I can never give;

hope fails, love fails, money fails, but they write emails just to me: electrically charged posts zapped through the atmosphere, through the impossibility of wired light, right into my office…

What one will probably find lacking over the course of this book is an adoptable (or even...