Satellite, Matthew Rohrer’s second book, is both logical extension of and subtle break with A Hummock in the Malookas, his National-Poetry-Series-winning debut. The same sweet-natured, wounded speaking voice navigates the (mostly) short poems here—poems reliant on quiet dislocations and narrative misdirection for effect. But the animism and (for lack of a better phrase) magical realism of Hummock have been replaced by a junkyard of biomechanical images that suggests a world of childhood wonder lost to post-Romantic weariness. The need for wonder, though, has not waned, and into this void Rohrer inserts “the clockwork imitation of spring, robotroid girlfriends,” and “taped together cars,” a mechanistic vision that gives the poems a means to comment upon their own lyric constructed-ness.
Rohrer acknowledges that poems, like the Panzer tank of “Precision German Craftsmanship,” are built out of rakes, hoses, and garden gnomes, makeshift vehicles headed toward “the brink of mystery.” This self-referentiality leads to an overriding sense of belatedness, and many of the poems seem like attempts to reconstruct an alternative adolescence. Even as they summon the atemporal world of the child’s imagination (“Do you / have aspirin? I’m right in the middle of an adventure”) and aspire to an Ashberian perspective (where the only threat of violence is of the ‘punch-in-the-pajamas’ variety), they never quite escape the pain of adulthood. Everywhere, Rohrer’s poems play against our lyric expectations as they approach familiar ideas of lyric transcendence—only to turn away and begin again. The true evidence of Rohrer’s growth as a poet, though, comes in the subtlety of the critical intelligence operating under the surface of his comic-fantastic. Lampooning post-structuralism as much as French gastronomy, he writes: “No man is an island. Also no one is interested / in excessive indeterminacy. The French / will eat the horse right out from under you.”