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Living Things
Poems. Saddle-stapled chapbook.
"In this marvelous collection, Charles Jensen gracefully ranges from grief to redemption in tightly constructed elegies. A lesser poet would have abandoned prosody for emotion, would have ignored creativity for therapy, would have betrayed the personal for the solipsistic, but Jensen's talent is large, encompassing, and smart. Like too few other poets on today's scene, he understands the elegy as genre and the capacity of poetry of all sorts to show, to guide, to confirm. I'm grateful for these personal glimpses into a death and a life, which are as unflinching as they are brave." —Jim Elledge
"In this marvelous collection, Charles Jensen gracefully ranges from grief to redemption in tightly constructed elegies. A lesser poet would have abandoned prosody for emotion, would have ignored creativity for therapy, would have betrayed the personal for the solipsistic, but Jensen's talent is large, encompassing, and smart. Like too few other poets on today's scene, he understands the elegy as genre and the capacity of poetry of all sorts to show, to guide, to confirm. I'm grateful for these personal glimpses into a death and a life, which are as unflinching as they are brave." —Jim Elledge
- GenresPoetry
27 pages, Chapbook
First published January 1, 2006
About the author
Charles Jensen
16 books95 followersCharles Jensen is the author of six chapbooks of poems, including the recent Story Problems and Breakup/Breakdown, and The First Risk, which was a finalist for the 2010 Lambda Literary Award. A second collection, Nanopedia, was published in 2018 by Tinderbox Editions. His previous chapbooks include Living Things, which won the 2006 Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award, and The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon (New Michigan Press, 2007). His poem “Tucson” received the 2018 Zócalo Poetry Prize. A past recipient of an Artist’s Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, his poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Bloom, Columbia Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Field, The Journal, New England Review, and Prairie Schooner. He is the founding editor of the online poetry magazine LOCUSPOINT, which explores creative work on a city-by-city basis. He lives in Los Angeles.
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February 1, 2009This review originally appeared in The Pedestal.
Winner of the 2006 Frank O´Hara Award Chapbook Competition, Charles Jensen´s spare and heartbreaking cycle of poems about the suicide of a former lover is chronicled in Living Things.
This collection, clocking in at twenty-six pages, is comprised of fourteen powerful poems, which unfurl in an arc that begins with the discovery of a body and ends with a returning home to an apparition following the funeral.
Jensen could have easily bogged Living Things down with melancholy and self-pity, and while you might shed a few tears, it won´t be in the places you might expect. There´s a sharp clarity and acceptance of death in these poems, yet both the narrator and the dead lover live and breathe on these black and white pages. There´s a cinematic quality to the scenes and details. It´s a short film waiting to be made, with Jensen´s words as dialog or voice-over.
The first few poems have an almost procedural quality, with the police arriving on the scene while the narrator sits outside the bathroom door where he found the body. The attention to detail regarding the cops going through motions, rather than the body, is an unexpected way to begin in "Evidence." There´s yellow crime tape, stone-faced officers, empty pill bottles dropped in evidence bags, the sound of a body-bag zipper.
The cops file out
like stiff, brittle quarter notes. You go last,
a black bag. A long, quiet rest.
In the next poem, "Weight," the ambulance arrives "like a thunderhead and likewise is slow to move on." The loading of the body is relayed in one line stanzas or short couplets that are sharp and definitive. There are no wasted words here; the moment does not need metaphor or flourish.
I sign your body into shipment.
You have lost an address.
Over the next two poems–"Shopping" and "Parlor"–the narrator must cope with buying clothes for the funeral and visit his ex-lover´s body lying in state at a funeral home. A bored clerk who “hates his job, hates me, hates my money–hates that you died and brought me here" has even economized his sympathy with a brief touch of the hand and quick counting back of change.
"Parlor" is one of the longer poems in the volume, and also marks the return of metaphor as well as a black humor.
The undertaker is young, attractive–
your type. Sharp suit. Muted tie.
It´s the kind of moment where I imagine
you´d make a joke about things that are “stiff"…
Viewing the body, the narrator notes the coldness that floats around the body in an ethereal way. The undertaker has clumsily laced the fingers wrong.
A lover would know
these little details, like how
this isn´t the first time
you´ve worn lipstick.
And still in the funeral home, "Regret" conveys quiet devastation in four short stanzas.
Your body at rest
is just a thing. A sad thing
I regret having ever touched.
The irony of flowers sent to a funeral ("I want to know whose idea this was, filling up death with hundreds of smaller deaths") gives way to a wake populated by the dead man´s ex-lovers. Even in death, a hint of jealousy remains in "Wake Ecstasy":
the luncheon overruns with men,
scampering about like oily rats.
Their noses twitch. They break up bits of food
and nibble. Each of them once gasped your name
and felt your breath at their ear.
This poem is the only thing that hints at what led up to the suicide, and the narrator suggests that there were secrets and suffering–for him and his lover–before the act.
They´ll never know you
the way I have–I know what it is to suffer. To be with you,
all those years, and never know the truth.
I knew your hands, thick and rough. It was proof enough.
After the funeral, there is the cleaning out of closets and donation of clothing; mail with the dead man´s name continues to arrive at the house; the narrator erases his lover´s phone number from his cell phone. A kitten hiding from a dog under the hood of a car in the drive and the narrator´s failed attempt to rescue it before it slipped down into the "organs of the car" elicits this devastating truth:
I know I couldn´t stop
your suicide. I only have two hands.
Beginning at the wake, the ghost of the dead lover has floated over the following work in one way or another, so as the volume concludes–with a poem called "Last Apparition"–the spirit is just a long shadow on the wall of their bedroom. It is a final acceptance of the death, letting go of guilt, and the first steps at moving on:
You are dead. And I still have my living things to do.
While the poems in Living Things are deeply personal, there is a universal equality about them. We will all eventually face the death of a loved one–possibly in tragic circumstances–and there is comfort and truth to be found in Jensen´s elegies for the dead, as well as indications as to how we can summon strength to go on living.
Winner of the 2006 Frank O´Hara Award Chapbook Competition, Charles Jensen´s spare and heartbreaking cycle of poems about the suicide of a former lover is chronicled in Living Things.
This collection, clocking in at twenty-six pages, is comprised of fourteen powerful poems, which unfurl in an arc that begins with the discovery of a body and ends with a returning home to an apparition following the funeral.
Jensen could have easily bogged Living Things down with melancholy and self-pity, and while you might shed a few tears, it won´t be in the places you might expect. There´s a sharp clarity and acceptance of death in these poems, yet both the narrator and the dead lover live and breathe on these black and white pages. There´s a cinematic quality to the scenes and details. It´s a short film waiting to be made, with Jensen´s words as dialog or voice-over.
The first few poems have an almost procedural quality, with the police arriving on the scene while the narrator sits outside the bathroom door where he found the body. The attention to detail regarding the cops going through motions, rather than the body, is an unexpected way to begin in "Evidence." There´s yellow crime tape, stone-faced officers, empty pill bottles dropped in evidence bags, the sound of a body-bag zipper.
The cops file out
like stiff, brittle quarter notes. You go last,
a black bag. A long, quiet rest.
In the next poem, "Weight," the ambulance arrives "like a thunderhead and likewise is slow to move on." The loading of the body is relayed in one line stanzas or short couplets that are sharp and definitive. There are no wasted words here; the moment does not need metaphor or flourish.
I sign your body into shipment.
You have lost an address.
Over the next two poems–"Shopping" and "Parlor"–the narrator must cope with buying clothes for the funeral and visit his ex-lover´s body lying in state at a funeral home. A bored clerk who “hates his job, hates me, hates my money–hates that you died and brought me here" has even economized his sympathy with a brief touch of the hand and quick counting back of change.
"Parlor" is one of the longer poems in the volume, and also marks the return of metaphor as well as a black humor.
The undertaker is young, attractive–
your type. Sharp suit. Muted tie.
It´s the kind of moment where I imagine
you´d make a joke about things that are “stiff"…
Viewing the body, the narrator notes the coldness that floats around the body in an ethereal way. The undertaker has clumsily laced the fingers wrong.
A lover would know
these little details, like how
this isn´t the first time
you´ve worn lipstick.
And still in the funeral home, "Regret" conveys quiet devastation in four short stanzas.
Your body at rest
is just a thing. A sad thing
I regret having ever touched.
The irony of flowers sent to a funeral ("I want to know whose idea this was, filling up death with hundreds of smaller deaths") gives way to a wake populated by the dead man´s ex-lovers. Even in death, a hint of jealousy remains in "Wake Ecstasy":
the luncheon overruns with men,
scampering about like oily rats.
Their noses twitch. They break up bits of food
and nibble. Each of them once gasped your name
and felt your breath at their ear.
This poem is the only thing that hints at what led up to the suicide, and the narrator suggests that there were secrets and suffering–for him and his lover–before the act.
They´ll never know you
the way I have–I know what it is to suffer. To be with you,
all those years, and never know the truth.
I knew your hands, thick and rough. It was proof enough.
After the funeral, there is the cleaning out of closets and donation of clothing; mail with the dead man´s name continues to arrive at the house; the narrator erases his lover´s phone number from his cell phone. A kitten hiding from a dog under the hood of a car in the drive and the narrator´s failed attempt to rescue it before it slipped down into the "organs of the car" elicits this devastating truth:
I know I couldn´t stop
your suicide. I only have two hands.
Beginning at the wake, the ghost of the dead lover has floated over the following work in one way or another, so as the volume concludes–with a poem called "Last Apparition"–the spirit is just a long shadow on the wall of their bedroom. It is a final acceptance of the death, letting go of guilt, and the first steps at moving on:
You are dead. And I still have my living things to do.
While the poems in Living Things are deeply personal, there is a universal equality about them. We will all eventually face the death of a loved one–possibly in tragic circumstances–and there is comfort and truth to be found in Jensen´s elegies for the dead, as well as indications as to how we can summon strength to go on living.
November 27, 2007
Charles is not only a good, old friend from college, but also a fantastic writer.
Even if I didn't have a personal connection to his work, I would love it. His poetry is the kind that stands out from the masses when you read it in anthologies. He is absolutely marvelous.
Even if I didn't have a personal connection to his work, I would love it. His poetry is the kind that stands out from the masses when you read it in anthologies. He is absolutely marvelous.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews