For Lack of a Calling

Mark DeCarteret’s poems wear their elegant disillusionment lightly, as if they knew that only by losing our projections do we see clearly: “The same ad for dawn again. How I’ve mastered/ its theme song but not the game show that follows.” These lovingly made poems, charged with wit and uncanny insights into our quotidian, linger on all that’s unstill: the sea, deer, the self. “Anything not solid is at a loss” until the poet endows it with language. Giving the lie to the book’s title are the signs of vocation everywhere evident in these savvy and unsparing pages.

— Askold Melnyczuk, founder of AGNI