William Huhn wants “a second soul—a beaten one would do,” but distraction seems to flicker everywhere. One moment the poet grasps for transcendence; and in the next, he considers seafood—shrimp, specifically.
The shopping list he commissions for his beloved travels from the possibility of a soul set on ice to “those baby shrimps / frozen like kisses / or the chilled ones / fresh on beds of ice / tender reminds of / our winter-cozy / dawns—of horizons / a world on its axis / turned dark.”
These passageways where interests wander and collide will keep appearing throughout Bachelor Holiday (BlazeVOX, 2024), Huhn’s debut full-length collection. His speakers crave greater meaning than they alone can muster—yet the symptoms and situations of ordinary life keep turning their heads around.
Huhn shows his hand early, with the poem “Diarist.” The woman depicted “mostly liked to set down / curious episodes, rare as / they may be in her life.” Biblical lore, crowded with serpents and forbidden fruit, can barely hold the character’s interest. She would rather not write, Huhn observes, then write of something too broad or plain.
The poet lives and writes well between these poles, consumed by curious episodes on his way up the nearest holy mountain. This search and its too-many detours—some everyday and others existential—stand to resonate with a wide swath of readers.
In “Expedition,” Huhn’s speaker loses friends on the way to an actual physical summit, “scattered on the mountainside / in night, like uncharted stars.” Tragedy reveals—and then confirms—what little faith he held in these companions. And it prompts visions of “the Lamb of God in the shadow / of the scavenger’s wing they fled,” this sight giving the speaker a confidence, perhaps unearned, in an ability to reach “rebirth.”
Transcendence titters at the edges of everyday life again in the briefly staggering “I Let.” Huhn’s speaker falls apart, physically but also in a cosmic way. (“The stars had won the match,” he writes.)
“It was all very natural / a miracle no less / free of a life / few master,” Huhn writes.
This pulling apart prompts thoughts of the bodies, especially the small “living children,” who will remain intact, and sends his speaker to church “‘twixt / the birds of the air / all of us are saved.” If you cannot solve the greater mysteries, you might as well keep walking into them.
Within poems like “I Let,” which redound through the text, Huhn sometimes adopts a punctuation-free style, liberating line break and the slightest indentation to speak with significance. These choices pull on the reader, causing them to run alongside and then trip over the same details as the speaker.
A different class of transcendent magnet—the dirt, the coffin—call out through “Grave Villanelle,” in which Huhn’s speaker seeks to escape the expectation of something more for an earthier eternal rest.
“Ghost Church” lives in a similar space, where true echoes and the echoes found in detritus form remnants of “a faith / some had in the night, / save the fraught / promise of winter’s / end and voices from / no one can tell.”
And back in “Summer Fragment,” the poem of souls and shrimp, the spiritual and soil-bound execute a strange, beautiful dance. The desire to shed gum from one’s shoes provokes reminders of great thunderstorms which, in turn, lead to images of blood drives and natural disasters. This odd but authentic connectedness arrives in a stream of real consciousness.
Throughout Bachelor Holiday, Huhn delivers and opens a beautiful chest full of images: the recurring “stars sun-shot off lumbering waves” in “Summer Fragment”; the “unveiled … vision” which “catches like matchlight on letters carved for love of whom her stone lies” in “Sylvia”; the unseen and ever-growing skeleton central to “Long Bones.”
Approaching the collection’s end, Huhn leaves us with paired poems: one epic (the suite-like “First Love of the Sun King”) and one ever-brief (“Envoi”). The two seem to tell ancient tales, origin stories of a sort, describing love and lonely treasure, tales of navigating heartsickness before death and of the poverty only a royal could know.
Huhn’s final four lines, which comprise “Envoi,” remind us of life’s shortness and of the fleeting joys which alight on, then evade us. While set apart from the rest of the book both physically and tonally, they underline its premise.
We are forever being pulled both into grand drama and off the sides of roads where the curious episodes live. To keep our eyes open and wits sharp means enjoying the transcendent while also embracing those moments that could only ever happen right here and now.
Aarik Danielsen is the arts and culture editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri. His essays, poems and journalism have been published at Image Journal, Plough, Split Lip, HAD, Rain Taxi, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and more. Find more of his work at https://aarikdanielsen.com/