John Amen’s latest book of poetry “Dark Souvenirs” is a haunting exploration of death, suicide, and drug addiction that is so beautifully written that even though the reader knows parts of it were hell, it leaves them grateful to be able to go with Amen on the journey to try to understand all that transpired. Amen’s poetic exploration of his brother’s suicide moves through death, addictions, coping, survival, and trauma and is like a musical composition, the sound of his brother’s trumpet woven throughout, right beside the gun he shot himself with and its ammunition.
Almost every poem in this book has a reference to music, whether it be a tablature, jazz, a sharp melody, an opera, a flat guitar riff, Elvis, or a sax solo. This feels like an homage to Amen’s musician brother as well as like a concert in which each piece reaches a level of feeling that moves the audience. The book is a crescendo. Poem after poem make the reader gasp in the most tragically glorious way as it witnesses heroin addiction, holding onto someone and letting them go, and when they unalive themselves, trying to understand the choice to do so and the reverberating pain that goes with it, wanting always to bring them back.
Climbing in and out of dreams and reality of a family’s history, Amen takes readers on a quest to understand life and death. It is as if he’s exposing secret after family secret, taking away any and all shame while trying to uncover truths. In the poem “First Date,” he writes: “—don’t misunderstand me, I’m not/ giving you a story, I’m trying to work/ my way out of one.” (p. 22)
It’s easy to hang onto every word and phrase in these poems like they are a story the reader needs to understand just as the speaker is trying to understand who he is in the context of what happened and in the face of grief and loss. For anyone who has ever known an addict or even seen what addictions to drugs can do, for anyone who has ever known someone who has died by suicide or even just died, there are things one might wish they said, there are things one might wish they had done. These mysterious ghosts of what might have been sit at the kitchen table in the form of ancestors with concentration camp tattoos, superstitions, and feelings of guilt and remorse.
There are so many should have moments when someone dies by suicide and yet, in “Dark Souvenirs,” the speaker’s brother shooting himself is how it went down. It’s so hard to know how to treat an addict. What does one do to save another person, if that’s even possible? Amen wonders about moments when the story might have been changed. And once the speaker’s brother was gone, the time passed both slowly and quickly and memories lingered beside these wonderings about whether anything different could have been done to save him.
In the poem “To Find You Like That,” (p. 27) Amen writes:
The angel asked if you were ready to go,
& you said that you wanted to stay a bit longer
with the red lilies in the rock garden.
You wanted to play your horn in the bleeding petals,
in the long, hairy vines,
you wanted to wait & see
if anyone would show up to delay your performance.
The poem goes on to say that the angel was “impatient,” and the reader understands that the brother dies, but is left with the idea that the speaker couldn’t do anything to stop his death and may feel that they didn’t do something to stop it, as if they arrived too late. The horror of finding anyone dead from a self-inflicted gunshot, much less someone who you have history with, who died by his own hands, who lived a life you shared and whose death might have been your own, is heart wrenching. The reader sees heroin winning, the gun winning, and the context of all of it. The reader sees other people in the brother’s life, his family, ancestors, and an account of historical trauma that includes holocaust genocide.
In the poem “Understudy,” (p. 30) the speaker says he wasn’t going to kill himself or shoot the gun, but he “gripped” it. The reader imagines a scene with the speaker trying to understand his brother’s suicide, the depth of his pain, what made him do it, how it was to hold the gun and then shoot it, then he finishes the poem: “I couldn’t master the trigger, couldn’t finish/ my ritual. I spilled the bullets on the rug, fled/ into my yard, ripe with blossoms & birdsong,/ two or three times whispered I’m sorry I’m sorry,/ I don’t know for what or to whom I was speaking.”
An understudy is a person who learns another actor’s role. As the brother, perhaps the speaker wonders if he too is in line for this end and if so, tries to comprehend it in order to avoid it. And possibly to question: Why him and not me? These questions of death and suicide, the speaker trying to understand his brother’s pain and his own, a history of trauma and addiction are ever-present. It feels like there are two turning points in the book where the speaker begins to realize the pain is one that only he can get himself out of, similarly aligned with the fact that no one was able to save his brother. The first is in the poem “Breathless” (p. 32). Amen writes: “as muggy summer pounces, I too am stranded/ in dangerous water, no ghost ship swelling on the horizon,/ no mermaid gliding from the weedy depths,/ I’m the only one who can get me back to the shore.”
Amen gives the reader an arc of searching for answers impossible to find except in oneself and at this point in the book, begins a journey through all the ways people died or almost died and ways people get close to death. The speaker reflects on all the deaths experienced as someone who continues to live but has also gotten dangerously close to dying. The second turning point comes just a few poems later in “Recovery.” (p. 37) He writes: “Who you were can never meet who you are/ can never meet who you’ll be.” The speaker tells the reader, tells himself, tells solitude: “Ancient solitude,/ your real work can begin.”
This title “Recovery” may mean in a clinical sense of the word, with detox and rehab, but may also mean a recovery of memory and trying to piece together all of the events that transpired, trying to understand them and who the speaker is in the framework of these events and the pain they brought.
In the poem “Where the work is,” (p. 41) he writes there’s no way to “drive oily death back to his casino town.” This might be read as there is no way to take death back to a place where everyone gambles for it. Death won’t undo itself and make someone alive again.
Amen takes us to a desperate realm of heroin addiction and a theatrical play unfolds from there with a multiverse taking the place of many worlds all at once: a history of a family, the speaker’s brother Richard, his father, the wife. The reader pieces together all that has happened and is left, as one might imagine the speaker is left, trying to make sense of it all. The language and description is clear, all of the events over time are clear and still, it’s so hard to comprehend how tragedy unfolds and how others are left holding the pieces. It is as if there is a list of characters in a play with different points of view, all faced with the reality of death and loss.
In the poem, “Usually when I recall you,” (page 50) Amen writes:
“—Today I pictured you twirling in the heavy rain,
instrument tucked under your shirt. I’d like to remember
you like that, not yield to what always jangles next, that
staccato blast in the pawnshop, a cop calling at three in the
morning. Did a powder-blue opus mushroom in your skull?
Of course, we want to have a lasting image of someone we loved as a happy image, an image of joy rather than pain and torment, rather than shot dead. Even this imagining feels like a working through what was, toward something lighter, leaving guilt, regret, inquiries, and longing behind. These poems bring questions of mortality, the reality of suicide, and the meaning of compassion to the center stage. In them, the speaker wonders about what our life work is, wonders what our finale is, our masterpiece, and comes to a kind of resolve, tracing his own steps through his feelings about suicide and how he was unable to save his brother. He faces his own sorrow and all people with their sorrow, and in a way, through his exploration, all deaths become the same death.
In the penultimate poem of the book “Tableau Vivant” (p. 82) or essentially a living picture, one we might think of as a piece of art with silent models, the speaker says: “I have the photos, the what-ifs,/ I have that last conversation/ & these crawling hours/ to parse what was said/ & what wasn’t.”
Isn’t that what the living are left with after someone has died? All the questions that are raised when one begins to imagine what might have been a different ending. Especially after a suicide. Though the poems in this book wrestle with the horror of addiction, pain, suicide, and loss, they give the reader a sense that in diving in and out of the past and engaging in this drama, Amen has undertaken the task of examining every angle and because he has been brave enough to do so, he has crafted and conducted a piece of music that’s entirely new. As a reader, I felt lucky to be along for the ride and to listen.
Liza Wolff-Francis is a poet and writer with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College who served two terms as a member of the Albuquerque Poet Laureate Program’s Selection Committee and continues on the organizing committee. Her writing has most recently appeared in Steam Ticket, The Raven’s Perch, SLAB, We’Moon, among others. She has a chapbook out called Language of Crossing.