“There is a tomorrow here someplace”

A Review of Tom Snarsky’s Reclaimed Water

Reclaimed Water. Ornithopter Press, 97 pages, $18

What does it mean to live in a world where our capacity to love, marvel, and imagine matches our capacity to produce, accumulate, and destroy? What human miracles exist alongside the errors that continue to march us towards complete psychic, social, and ecological ruin, and how do we harness the emotional muscle to foil our involvement in the whole enterprise? At once humorous, tender, and grim, these are the questions Tom Snarsky considers throughout his second full-length poetry collection, Reclaimed Water, to grasp which is more inevitable: humanity or collapse?  

Love under the threat of industry is immediately apparent in the collection’s opening poem, “Saddest Factory,” which begins: 

Love, the place to be

my smallest self

without fear, is close

to the old factory

where they used to make 

buttons … (7)

The use of a delicate image like buttons signals how industry and consumerism gain traction as the primary means for survival, and how the self has no choice but to deteriorate. In another poem, “Pack My Box with Five Dozen Liquor Jugs, for example, we learn “…we are tethered / To the future of money / Aka in debt / Aka in something poems alone / Don’t solve” (80). Likewise, the speaker in “The Roses of Heliogabalus” admits: “sorry I’m here now / I was just at the shame store / returning something” (45).

Everything that has value loses value once accrued, even language itself. Even our most honest attempts to be vulnerable with one another are muffled into pure debris: “The second it’s said / It enters into / A bucket of saying” (73). To complicate matters, these poems create awareness about what we must deny within ourselves to survive, as evidenced by the speaker’s confession in “I Tell the Ghost of Georg Trakl I’m Sad the Poems Are Not Coming out Well”: “I would rather stare / into the abyss than learn / anything. I won’t // say this in job / interviews” (68). Ultimately, the “saddest factory” becomes a stand-in for our individual and collective psyche. We perform our humanity as outlined by the system only to wind up spiritually depleted. 

Fittingly, Hugo Simberg’s 1896 painting, The Garden of Death, in which three Grim Reapers tend to sparse flowers, figures as the collection’s cover art as if to imply growth is inherently tragic. As such, the collection is divided into two sections—before progress and after progress, perhaps—and in “Hoosegow,” an early poem in section two, Snarsky laments that over time, this shared trauma will be our solitary link: “Gardens / begin to crawl back into being / the greenest shared headache of love // after money” (58). As we stand in the aftermath, however, do we honor this “shared headache of love” or spurn its flimsiness? Similarly, a poem comprised of a single couplet, “Possum Heaven” considers if what we garden—love, beauty, memory, connection—is true or a lie we convince ourselves of: “and the gone little soul on the side of the road said, / one day I will be part of a flower” (64). How to interpret the conviction of the animal’s “I will”? Is death truly generative or is to believe so a matter of coping? 

The resulting sadness across Snarsky’s verse is a sadness of gross perplexity. We exist in a world that is patently unclear, illogical, contradictory. Towards the end of the collection, in “Confusion Matrix,” the speaker is proud to secure a job at a water reclamation facility, only to find himself marching obediently towards his grave: 

…They taught me 

the sequence, raw

to effluent, effluent to

reclaimed, I paid into the state

retirement system, my children

saw the rain that recharged

the groundwater, and when I died

there was weeping

and inexpensive cake (88)

Contribution to and by the state is demanded ad infinitum, yet this model of success is all but satisfying (it’s interesting that “saddest factory” sounds like satisfactory when said aloud). Many of Snarsky’s poems are reedy and elongated, each line its own short burst moving rapidly down the page, a visual representation of the obsession with advancement for the sake of advancement. Urgency, and for what? Snarsky’s poems also tend to roll out across multiple sections which are terse and fragmentary, taxed to make meaning in isolation as they seek their counterparts. In this way, poetry is also fettered by the state and what is expected of us. This fragility of part-to-whole, whole-to-part is not brokenness, however, but a potential for renewal. 

In “Song of Restoration,” dedicated to Snarsky’s beloved, a poem I imagine will be a favorite of the collection, the poet scripts: “You are still / dazzling, but in fragments;— / everywhere a hint of a whole […] I am looking / at your face and seeing it as / night’s greatest gift: the slack that / with diamonds or glass / throws light all over the room” (49). I interpret this light and hint of a whole as the self’s ability to cohere, which hinges upon how well one maintains a sense of heart beneath the weight of the system. Snarsky emphasizes this facility in an earlier poem, “Outer Tactics,” where the distinction between inventory and memory—what we accumulate through desensitization and capitalist thinking versus what we accumulate through genuine feeling—comes to a head. As the speaker catalogs references to music and poetry across a variety of technologies—radio, CDs, Spotify—all he wishes to remember are his father’s hands, what they looked like, felt like, as if to say the heart is its own archive, a better, more imperfect one. The poem concludes with the tender lines: “my dad / always loved / that one / Staind song” (15).

Later, and by no coincidence, the speaker in “Zum weißen Engel” has properly “forgotten all tactics”: 

The deer that just watches an oncoming car

Attentively 

Is my sister

The fly that descends into the apple 

Cider vinegar

With one drop of dish soap

Is my love (63)

All of which is to say, despite the obstacles, love persists in the most uncontainable and well-intentioned ways. Snarsky’s version of reclamation is thus aimed at freeing the self, others, and matter from all unjust obligation. It is a form of good will, of love, a tribute to our (momentarily) forgotten agency, and it is entirely worth it, not wasteful in the least. To return to the original question, in Snarsky’s Reclaimed Water, which is more inevitable: humanity or collapse? Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.