leƒt on read

The title of Left on Read evokes not just an unanswered text message but also the violation of a traffic rule. Like a driver turning left on red, the poet takes us in a direction that is risky and unsanctioned, veering within the space of a single poem from pastoral dreams full of flowers and sunlight into nightmares in which posies appear to be grey bullets. Ultimately, however, Hirschaut's achievement here lies in the way he explores the space between dreams and nightmares: the sleepless nights and early mornings full of grainy coffee that the poet sips alone, "lips pressed against nothing but porcelain." Rejecting the comfortable clichés of love poetry and other "memories that aren't mine," Hirschaut plunges instead into a stark reality that he calls "undersold and ours"-in which, for example, an anonymous girl who appears "golden" turns out to be lit by the neon sign of a convenience store. Hirschaut is not afraid to indulge in this kind of "neon fantasy" (in fact, he suggests that fantasy is essential to self-discovery), but he is at his best when he shows us how the poet's dreams are less compelling than their raw material-- the everyday experiences that make up what Yeats called famously "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."- Sam Alexander, Associate Professor of English at Endicott College