Someone Is Awake All Night by Beth Joselow

 

I really enjoyed the poems by Beth Joselow’s always surprising and inventive new book, Someone Is Awake All Night. Each poem is its own room. The mood is a fascinating combination of frightened and calm, overwhelmed and steadfast. The subject matter changes and slides within the poems and between poems in a way that’s sometimes oblique yet also feels grounded in good sense. The poems can be dark or funny or both. They don’t avoid human pain while also refusing to make pain the point.

The book shows the importance of contemplation as a useful response to distress, how aging can’t be avoided but doesn’t have to define everything about experience. The poems feel oddly comforting even when they don’t really offer comfort, if we can imagine that comfort can come from being alive to the awareness of what we sometimes cannot do. There are no platitudes in Someone Is Awake All Night. There’s just the reality of waking again and looking at oneself and others and figuring out how to stay present in the world in whatever time we have left.