Feed Me Weird Things
by Lisa Rogal

Reviewed by Erin Becker

Lisa Rogal’s Feed Me Weird Things is more white space than words. This slim, quirky chapbook is made up of eighteen poems, many of which begin on the bottom third of the page, as if to give the reader a few gulps of air before plunging into the depths.

The poems rove from dreamscapes to breakfasts, from curving mountain rivers to shopping for groceries in wintertime. They explore dishwashing at midnight, the banality of a morning orange juice in the face of crushing trauma, and the nostalgia for a coffee date that hasn’t happened yet. The chapbook pings between the mundane and the surreal, veering from hyper-specific texture to generalized idea. Meanwhile, an omnipresent and perhaps-not-so-benevolent “culture” is seen to permeate conversation and thought and the very core of who we are.

The poems all feature clipped lines––often just a word or two––and stanzas that follow one logical path before darting off toward something more unexpected. The poems also feature details that place them squarely in the narrator’s physical world: a yellow bathroom; bubbles on the surface of a soda; a cricket the narrator fed to a turtle. Yet despite this precise, quotidian language, the overwhelming feeling of the chapbook is one of floating. Our feet never touch this world’s solid ground. We never linger on one image or setting too long. Not quite dream or reality, the feeling in Feed Me Weird Things is that of being suspended between times and places––a misty gray area in the middle.

At first glance, aside from their style, the poems seem to have little to do with one another. But it’s this sense of suspension, of floating, of in-between-ness, that eventually emerges as the chapbook’s thematic through-line. Tracing a skinny wake in a sea of white space, the poems explore the gulf between our expectations of an event and its reality, reckoning with the yawning gap between what could be and what was.

“I used to eat / the manes / of horses,” the narrator says, remembering a childhood where they knew all the names of clouds and found these horses’ manes “dirt delicious.” The past seems much more interesting than the present, full of clouds and horses and manes they’d sneak a nibble of––everything that filled the narrator’s world and drew their attention. Now? The narrator no longer does things. Perhaps, they reflect, they are even “done being” themselves.

And this is not the only poem situated in the gulf between what we’re taught about adulthood and the uneasy sense of never quite arriving that actually comes as we age. In another poem, the narrator recalls all the time they’ve spent worrying about the cricket they fed to that turtle when they were young. The poem’s title: “I will be upset if it turns out nothing matters.” In contrast with the robust aliveness of the narrator’s past––horses’ manes, crickets pinched between fingers––adulthood seems uninteresting and anxiety-making. Also, something of a scam.

The implied question––does anything matter?––is further explored in the poem “Another train.” Here, it’s not just adulthood the narrator suspects might not live up to expectations. Self-efficacy is on notice, too: “Another cold day ends / I did it again / I’m still me.” In this poem, every line begins with either an “I” or “Another,” the repetition calling into question whether any of the things that the narrator has been told will make a difference really do: arriving on time, taking care, having a thought on the porch. Over and over again, the narrator acts, but it’s not clear whether anything can, or will, ever change.

One after another, Rogal’s poems continue this probing of the gap between imagination and daily life, the gap between what was supposed to be, and what never quite came to pass. One poem questions, somewhat humorously, whether the reality of pausing time would be anything like the fantasy of it. Sure, “a stopped / night breath” would be nice. But how would you even know when to stop it? And what exactly would happen to the birds? Similarly, another poem begins by exploring the pleasures of natural vistas––a sunset, a lovely tree––but immediately follows with the caveat: these pleasures cannot last forever. As in the poem about the preemptive nostalgia for the coffee date, here Rogal situates her observations squarely between the joy of the present moment and its ultimate fleetingness: “the mountain becomes / a memory.” The narrator wants more: more pleasure, more mountains, more lovely trees. Perhaps more memories. It’s left uncertain whether the narrator will ever get what they want.

One of the chapbook’s shortest poems is also its most impactful. It’s titled “The feel of humans.” This is the poem in its entirety:

you can pretend
there isn’t a longing
that never ends

“The feel of humans” is wistful. It’s also comforting, in a way, and full of possibility. It’s comforting because we’re not alone in this longing, which, as this poem implies, is so very human. And it’s full of possibility because where there is longing, there is also something to hope for. There is a creative opportunity inherent in melancholy, in nostalgia, in dissatisfaction, in desire. A precondition for yearning, after all, is the capacity to imagine something more. In exploring the act of yearning, Feed Me Weird Things explores the creative act itself. We may not have the answers, Rogal seems to say. But maybe we don’t need them.

Art isn’t arrival. It’s process. It’s “longing  / without / touching.” It’s doing your best to describe the “dirt-delicious” flavor of the horse’s mane, even if it’s been so long since you’ve bitten down. Even if you can’t quite remember the taste.