Night Sweat: Poems by Nathan Leslie

Reviewed by Eric Weinstein

ISBN: 978-0-9789041-6-6ISBN 978-0-9801786-2-3
Hamilton Stone Editions, 2009

Nathan Leslie is a gifted fiction writer, and it shows in his first collection of poetry, Night Sweat. This is intended as both praise and criticism: praise in the sense that his faculty with language and narrative sensibility permeate his book, and criticism insofar as he often seems to treat poetry and prose as different manifestations of the same gestalt when they are more effectively used as complementary, yet fundamentally different methods of expression. That is to say, prose and poetry do different work, and this is not immediately clear in Leslie’s writing.

Leslie occasionally has difficulty separating the line as unit of meaning from the sentence as unit of meaning, which may simply be the result of his relying exclusively on the latter when writing fiction. This does not wholly compromise the lyric quality of Leslie’s poetry or damage the narratives he constructs, but it does occasionally inflict a flatness of tone in his work. Some poems, like “Carney,” read somewhat like prose with line breaks:

Who knows if I could run the joint the way
I do now. If I owned it I’d make exceptions:
Someone else would jostle and chase
ganja punks from where they splintered the cues,
someone else would work from five to two
every weekend so their wife gives up and moves
back to her Jersey hometown in a huff,
and that someone else could learn how to angle
a two-nine combo for the county nine-ball win,
only to lose the set on slop shots and luck banks.

Others, like “Jerome,” occasionally conflate the sentence and the line: “Blow torch. / They clutch me again. / Calming, sweat, pat.” While there’s certainly nothing wrong with this practice, it evinces a lack of awareness of what poetry can accomplish through tension, contradiction, and amphiboly between lines and sentences, and it seems an additional dimension that would otherwise be available to Leslie is lost.

That said, Leslie more often than not proves himself an adept poet, particularly in his juxtaposition of dream imagery (“The latest greatest claps through / morning mist, a wine bottle snake / riding a canoe bottom—”) and the waking world (“Hot gravel on my tender pink feet bottoms”). Night Sweat is essentially about the encroachment of the dream world on daily life, the endless (re)visitation of one’s past via the vehicle of dream, and the blurring of one’s real and imagined selves. The last few lines of “In the Rumpus Room” beautifully sum up the simultaneously nightmarish and nostalgic qualities in these opposing worlds: “Promise me the forceps aren’t rusty, / that you can pinch me at arm’s length. / Pinch me awake when the clouds cover the sun.”

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Prick of the Spindle poetry editor Eric Weinstein’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2009, Third Coast, and Colorado Review. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

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