Tabletop Anxieties & Sweet Decay

5/5 ( ratings)

"Handling the visceral experience of living and loss with originality and keen awareness, poets Tim Heerdink and Tony Brewer distinguish themselves in their collaboration “Tabletop Anxieties & Sweet Decay.”

This is a collection of poems that gracefully scaffold the full range and various expressions of change and challenges. “I’m a walking art exhibit,” Heerdink writes, “making my path toward another stop.” “We…want to feel the fragile edges of each other & lift friable ink from pages with our own nervous oils,” Brewer adds.

The lines in Tabletop Anxieties & Sweet Decay” are finely wrought, but they also have the strength and age of iron. “The scissors are hungry/the toilet is sick/the refrigerator is an angry wet hen/ the house wheezes air/like a voice inside a skull,” writes Brewer in his poem, “The Scissors Are Hungry.” “I find myself listening to the growl/my gut makes when it remembers/food is all that matters when you’re out,” Heerdink confesses in “Take My Heart, Give Me a Fork.”

Heerdink and Brewer have distinct styles, and yet there is also a synergy in this poetic conversation that enables the writers to expand the reach of what they want to say. One haunting and memorable stanza from Heerdink: “Grief is a coin/where one side is love & the other pain.” An incisive admission from Brewer: “I often finish fights/that begin with my eyes.”

Life holds love and grief that is interchangeably both microscopic and unfathomable. It is a skillful poet who can communicate the full range—and raging intensity—of this—what it means to live, love, long for, and lose. In Tabletop Anxieties & Sweet Decay, Heerdink and Brewer manage to tell us about all of it in a style that is thrilling and unforgettable."

- Amy Alexander, author of “Neverland Is Always an Island” and “The Legend of the Kettle Daughter”