*
Listen is Steven Cramer’s sixth collection of poetry. The book’s inaugurating subject, a prolonged struggle with depression, brings closer to home the purely imagined speaker of Cramer’s previous book, Clangings (2012), whose language manifested the “clang associations” of manic and schizophrenic speech. Listen’s poems face what Dickinson called “that White Sustenance/Despair,” offering deeply intimate lyric testimony about a widespread human condition. But, as Kevin Prufer writes, “these poems begin in depression, but their territories are wide, diverse, and very vivid.” The later sections of Listen intensely grapple with the magical thinking that shapes, or misshapes, our deepest attachments; dramatize the anxieties of this especially perilous moment in history; and ultimately pay homage to the fragile consolations of art.

COSTCO

Steven Cramer

Jars of Heinz the size of Grecian urns;
enough Reynolds Wrap to foil an asteroid,

Eros in particular. Who’s not aroused
by sales?  My cart’s heavy as the Fiat

I watched four Romans lift into a spot
downwind from the Coliseum’s air

of cat piss. Sun through skylights
makes lap-tops, flat-screens, and vats

of Tide shine.  Putti-like, kind of,
sparrows loft down from the vaults.

But when a day’s gone oyster-gray,
its weight a ten-pound tub of putty,

all the wholesale sponges in the world
can’t suck up this sense that I’m a poor

generic thing, reduced to Creature
Double Feature’s Incredible Shrinking

Everyman. His six-pack pre-steroid,
a three-cent stamp for his loincloth,

he dueled housecats with a safety pin,
giving heart to boys small for their age,

until he kept on shrinking to a voice-over
of cosmic dust, hack actor risen to the stars.

— Steven Cramer

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