Over Here - Paperback

In Over Here, Alan Gillis reveals surreal intersections of mind and world, neither of which are stable: " For the mind is the sea, / the mind is mountains, rivers, and the great earth / moving and suspended until it's not." If Gillis's poems feel like a high-wire act, they remain grounded, conscious of the threat of a brutal fall. Violence is often at the edges, as are anxieties of climate change, the staggering death toll of the pandemic, toxic masculinity, and internet trolls. Still, humor is a staple in this volume: " my head and backbone / through demonic consubstantiation, / are now seventy-five percent smartphone." Equally attentive to pastoral possibility and our digital reality, to poetic form and even the poetic use of emojis, Gillis answers angst with an abundant hope-- in language, in nature, and their intermingling intricacies: It's hard to be anything other than a doomster, but we're lifted by the swooshed pines of this woodland, in and out of our minds, its comedy of squirrels, moss-bed squelch, ladybird throng.