Every hungry poet should read ‘Model of a City in Civil War.’

Theodore Vaughn
Nov 3 · 2 min read

Adam Day’s poems are puzzle-broken half realities: it’s him and us at the table, chins in hands, peeking beneath the plates of human history, plying to derive meaning from life’s carelessness, from fate’s whimsy. Day pulls jagged pieces of history — phrases, quotes, anecdotes — together to create a reconstructed stained glass representation of world’s past.

“The incompleteness of the past; the ongoingness of history…”

There are new conclusions to draw, futures to adumbrate, and they’re created with such punchy polish and grace; every word feels so deliberate and dense. You get the sense a line might’ve taken a month.

Day’s from my neck of the woods. He sagaciously answers the quintessential Kentucky question — one that I, Happy Chandler, Jesse Donaldson, Wendell Berry, and every other Kentucky boy have been hair-tearingly trying to find catharsis for since the Louisana Purchase.

“I’ve moved and come back so many/times.”

It’s incredible that this sharp poet is unknown in literary circles. I was fortunate enough to find out about him through recommendation at a local bookshop. But this collection should be renowned: it contains worlds, like Whitman’s did, and the transitions between those worlds are like nothing I’ve seen in any poetry collection, for Day is a curator of his own work. Each poem ferries an idea, a word, a phrase across the page to the next. In this way, we transcend mere medley, which is what a lot of chapbooks and poetry collections end up being. It’s incredibly difficult to tie together pieces written with years between, but if Day’s historical poems prove anything, it’s that he’s uniquely up to task. In one poem, children evince for their folks the joy and naivete of natural movement: “[they] provide a pocketful of almonds.” In the next, a child is forced headfirst into a derelict well by his father: “it smelled like/the faint decay of overripe almonds.”

You should buy this book and read it twice. Even if you’re not a poet, there’s much nimbleness in his prose, much packed and tied history to play with and re-sort, and many proffered solutions to deeply modern imbroglios.

Day’s worlds are haunted, but we can move and cast the mysterious past for cultural betterment, for an augured future of tethered togetherness: “It might be safest/to stay home and read…Sunlight/on stones is nothing like laughter/and still there is nearly enough.”

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