Constellation Route
Matthew Olzmann
Reviewed by D.C. Eichelberger
As snow melted and we moved into a newly unfamiliar world, without mask mandates or social distancing, Matthew Olzmann’s Constellation Route arrived like a lost bundle of parcels. Olzmann’s work is vibrant, tender, and, above all, honest about the loneliness of being ostracized from the world and ourselves. Gun violence, environmental erosion, racism, and the anxiety of things falling apart fill this collection, and yet Matthew Olzmann’s epistolary poems continue to reach out a hand. He writes to the dead, to canyons and trees, to river monsters, with language that reverberates like the grooves of a Motown record playing for an audience who, like the barkeep in “The First Official Post Office of the American Colonies (1639)”, can listen in to feel the pure expression of loss and love.
The most poignant example of this is in “Fourteen Letters to a 52-Hertz Whale,” where Olzmann asks the whale:
Do you ever worry that because your voice is impossible to hear, maybe
no one will make the effort? That you can work really hard to be a
good person and try to make a difference in your community, but then—at
the end of the day—the waves will just swallow you whole?
If you have a long-lost love across the ocean or at the other end of the covers, or you see a world of forests and televisions on fire, or you find yourself in an alternate river of consciousness on an impossible mission to an unreal place with no chance of return, unsure of where you stand, open up Matthew Olzmann’s Constellation Route. It’s addressed to you.