Exit Strategies
By David Tomaloff

Reviewed by John Sibley Williams

Gold Wake Press, 2011
e-chapbook, 6 pp.

In this short collection of six conceptually and stylistically linked prose poems, David Tomaloff asks us to set aside our notions of reality in favor of his reimagined world of melting knives, neglectful wolves, revenge-seeking seas, and murderous punctuation marks. It turns out setting aside preconceived reality is easy when guided by the right hand.

Exit Strategies immediately stakes its claim as a unique and powerful addition to our great contemporary surrealistic poetry by weaving a tapestry where the objects and creatures encountered in our daily lives are imbued with consciousness, motivation, and human struggles and contradictions. There is both a sense of balance and a sense of the impossibility of balance; synchronicity and reciprocity and community built into the fear; nightmarish landscape; and simple, perhaps joyful, release of the world awoken to human capability:

Maybe the trees will take us for granted. Maybe they already have. Maybe we will grow up to do the same, you and I. Or maybe we’ll dive into the lake, together, and never come up. (II)

Within this surrealist approach to larger truths is a desperate, human plea for a solid footing from which to approach the world’s complexities: "…and I am as if I am dawn, awake." (V)

But is such a secure foundation possible with so many possible roads, so many translations of experience? Tomaloff refuses to say. When “a bloodletting” is also “a home,” when anyone can build “a fire from a forgotten friend,” how are we to reach a deeper understanding of ourselves or the world? Tomaloff refuses to say. He sheds just enough shadow in these poems to allow us honest rejoicing at the light creeping in from its unseen source. He leaves us questioning, introspective, but hopeful, " bringing life to where the fire had gone before us." (VI)

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John Sibley Williams is a literary publicist with an MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Book Publishing. He has served as Acquisitions Manager of Ooligan Press and Publicist for Three Muses Press. His poetry was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Rumi Prize for Poetry and won the 2011 Heart Poetry Award. His chapbooks include A Pure River (The Last Automat Press, 2010), Door, Door (Red Ochre Press, 2011), Autobiography of Fever (Bedouin Books, 2011), From Colder Climates (Folded Word, forthcoming), The Longest Compass (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming), and The Art of Raining (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, forthcoming). Some of his over 200 previous or upcoming publications include: The Evansville Review, RHINO, Rosebud,Ellipsis, Flint Hills Review, and Poetry Quarterly. Visit him at www.TheArtOfRaining.com.

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