Good Housekeeping by Bruce E. Whitacre
Poets Wear Prada, 2024
“Everything is domestical” Bruce E. Whitacre writes in “Dinner is Served,” a list poem in his new book, Good Housekeeping:
A crushed pillow could mean anything
A dose of silly here lances a broken heart there
The dog asleep under the table is the soul’s repose
Fondant is as much fun to say as to eat
Dinner parties always end in suds and scraping
In Whitacre’s collection, there are household maintenance events made surreal, as in this excerpt from “Hunting and Gathering”:
Fridge restocked with today’s deal on frozen mastodon
the hunter’s only wound an ego-bruise at checkout
cut off in line by a mink in sneakers
salved now by a bargain Malbec in a juice glass.
Witness his shopping trip in “War&Peace@Target,” where it’s the reptilian brain that is ascendant:
snake coiled but deaf and almost blind,
jaws endless, stomach bottomless.
There are also ruinous events when “the fizz goes flat,” though Whitacre suggests the effort is the success. Humor is woven through poems such as “The Foldout Couch,” where “Counting down the security deposit” results from too boisterous lovemaking with his husband that damages wall and floor:
His force thumps the entire divan
against the renter-white wall,
adding to the small dents.
These are the good years.
And then there is the hilarious sonnet, “Sorted.” The wordplay in “Sorted” can be found in other places in this delightful collection, as in the two meanings of “rest” in “Sunday Morning”:
Sunday morning God’s day of rest
Sunday morning like all the rest.
In the title poem, Whitacre writes, “It can’t go on like this; this is all we have.” A plea for change from our destruction of the planet through wasteful consumption, but the reader knows that Whitacre knows that it may very well go on like this, that “Greed is the root of evil yet it keeps us alive” in “the dwindling Anthropocene vista.”
Altogether, the reader can find in these pages well-crafted cleverness, music, and verve, and even some haiku.
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Susana H. Case is the author of If This Isn’t Love and The Damage Done (Broadstone Books), as well as other books and chapbooks.