My Heart Draws a Rough Map by Howie Good Reviewed by Kadzi Mutizwa
Howie Good’s My Heart Draws a Rough Map centers on a back and forth between two dynamically separate entities—a man and his heart. It’s a concept that first struck me as a little too far up the alley of an overly maudlin teenager’s diary entries—two of this chapbook’s opening lines are “My heart is riding the train into the city. It glances out the window . . . .” But Good manages to pull it off, executing the premise with enticingly sophisticated promise. He takes up an internal duality and a personal struggle that each of us knows all too well—heart vs. mind, emotion vs. reason, candor vs. caution. And he drives home that it’s that much more tempestuous of a battle when you’re living in a war zone, like the narrator. Good’s principal foot soldier in this war within a war is a man who (unsuccessfully) tries to make sense of his dismal surroundings, a land where “trees in full leaf haunted the highway for miles” and “Napoleonic soldiers” drag peasant girls into the woods. Although he’s no slouch of a thinker, someone who doesn’t like his concentration broken while he reads Kant, he is also tormented by the insuppressible palpitations of a heart that refuses to restrain itself or take the mind too seriously—it’s a heart that will “walk away. . . until it’s out of sight . . . never look[ing] back . . . [and that] doesn’t wave”; and one that “doesn’t answer” when it’s asked to come down from a roof onto which it has climbed to have a better view of “the system of roads built to carry away the dead.” When reason fails, as it invariably will, to provide this man (and his fellow “frightened beneficiaries of the incidental”) with satisfying explanations,” the heart—the entity that “knows what’s right”—compels itself to step in to try to pick up the mind’s slack. Through his brief, but pregnant, descriptions of the narrator’s interactions with his similarly alienated and afflicted wife, Good reminds us how a meeting of the minds pales in comparison to any kind of a meeting of the hearts. So, too, does he trenchantly capture the ins and outs of confusion-induced loneliness, and what it’s like to wade through an atmosphere littered with friends who “forget they’re friends.” Although the heart seems to come away with a slight advantage, it’s unclear whether it’s ultimately the heart or the mind that ends up winning this particular tussle. Just as it’s unclear how much good can ever really come from a stalemate. In the spirit of drawing rough maps and inducing confusion, there are a number of illustrations peppered throughout Good’s pages that are themselves hard to make sense of—sketches (of the kind you might find tacked onto elementary school bulletin boards) of childlike portraitures and colorful houses stacked atop one another, amid tulips and a sky dotted by a few twinkling stars—that all take away from the gravity of the main event. But when a main event is as grim as the one Good depicts, maybe simplistic imagery like this is just what we need to help counteract it—something that takes us back to a less complicated time and place, pre-ennui.
Visit Blue Hour Press on the web at http://www.bluehourpress.com/
Kadzi Mutizwa is a Midwesterner who currently lives and works in New York.
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