Oh wow…I feel eviscerated.
Poet and Carly Rae Jepsen fan Patrick Roche has crafted a stunning collection of visceral poetry that explores themes of love & loss, eating disorders, depression, mental health and suicidal thoughts (so trigger warnings for all) with a verbal dexterity that is often breath-taking. Roche relates his childhood as the boy who “only got a clock stuck on midnight” with an alcoholic father, in a life touched by tragedy.
In the clever “Retcon”, he compares the practice of “retconning” (when comics and TV show writers change details in previous storylines to fit in with new ones) to being able to change traumatic events in his own life-“and I think what a luxury it would be to erase or reset
at the stroke of a pen”. That resonates so much with me, not least because of the cultural reference.
Prepare to go through the emotional wringer in poems such as the heartfelt (and heart-breaking) “Self-Portrait as Piranha Plant” or “Suburbs in July”, a poignant reminder of the things we deliberately don’t or are unable to say even to those closest to us. “Gravity” explores the twisted logic of an eating disorder whilst several poems wrestle with depression.
I could quote forever - “My father drank himself into a funeral” from “Icarus”; “I start doing homework at Starbucks/I have more meaningful conversations with the barista than with my family” from “21”, a stunning entry told in a reverse countdown; “It’s so easy to tell someone you “forgot” to eat breakfast/If you word it the right way” from “Hocus Pocus”, which begins as a tribute to the movie of the same name but becomes something darker and will resonate with readers with eating disorders. Oh wow, here’s another line from it -“What is more witchcraft than the way this/body keeps moving forward/even when I put nothing into it”.
Oh god, here’s another awesome couple of lines - “So my phone grows heavier and heavier, heavy with/an albatross of words, heavy with apologies I should be/offering…” from “Ode to My Unread Messages”.
Things get progressively tougher in the third part. “Instructions on Having the Perfect Panic Attack” is exactly that and should be approached with caution, whilst “Every 40 Seconds” refers to the official statistics of how many people commit suicide each year, and it is about suicide, and oh boy, it’s a tough one, especially if you’ve been touched by suicide, but it ends on a hopeful note - “Hundreds of thousands of people are dying in silence/because of silence/but this is saying/we can keep each other breathing”. This is the best poem about suicide I have ever read. The final poem “Open Letter to the Author”, in which Roche addresses himself, ends the collection positively - “There’s a difference between you and yesterday./One still exists.”
Gut-wrenching, heart-breaking and brutally honest, “A Socially Acceptable Breakdown” shows Patrick Roche can do things with the alphabet that will turn you inside out.
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