Fauxccasional Poems

As alternate history poetics go, Tysdal's (The Mourner's Book of Albums) book is in many ways technically excellent, but it doesn't have much going for it besides the technical gymnastics. The collection includes a variety of forms: a sestinaiku (combining sestina and haiku), incantatory verse, binary code poems, and the more standard range of occasionals, pantoums, villanelles, couplets, and sonnets. The subject matter%E2%80%94including the Enola Gay crew's refusal to drop their payload, the survival of J.F.K. after Jackie's death by assassin's bullet, U.S. presidents as poet historians, and Twitter as 1960s social movement tool%E2%80%94should lend it weight and greater range. But the book rarely feels like more than an academic exercise taken to its logical conclusions. Its predictability and its oddly narrow range work against what could have been a body of poems inspiring deeper contemplation through ahistorical myth-making. Instead, what readers are left with is a work that cannot quite capture the often deeply tragic flow of history, and so replaces it with the artificial and cold comfort of unextrapolating reimaginings that lack nuance. It's a book potentially worth buying for the technical achievements but ultimately unsatisfying. (Sept.)