Contradictions in the Design

In this offbeat and insightful collection, Olzmann (Mezzanines) engages with art—in galleries, museums, and other spectacles—to question the assumptions that audiences make about the world. Many poems bear the word gallery in their titles, but Olzmann makes it clear that these aren’t typical ekphrastic poems. In the opening poem, Olzmann compares himself to a replica of the sculpture The Thinker, relating feelings of inadequacy due to an inability to think, as if his head were filled with “iron and bronze,/ not neurons and god.” Wandering through galleries of “American violence,” “severe head injuries,” and “wreckage,” among others, readers find personal vignettes about struggle, hurt, and poverty. There is often humor and wit—in one poem, beauty is measured in “millihelens” (also the title of the poem), which is the amount necessary to launch “exactly one ship”—but laughter isn’t the point. In “I’ll Forgive John Keats, but Not You,” the speaker’s fraught engagement with another gallery goer results in a profound exchange over the roots of values: “when I speak of beauty and you speak/ of beauty, we are not speaking/ about the same thing. And we are not friends.” Closing with a grateful observer in a place described as Medusa’s sculpture garden, Olzmann conveys gratitude in his own slant manner: “let me never/ take for granted/ how I’ve been granted/ this permanence.” (Nov.)