Order EVERYTHING USED TO WORK here
Scars are ghosts of wounds that reminds us of our sorrows.
I notice something changing about me every couple months or so. Some food I used to like doesn't taste so good anymore, Certain musical genres start growing on me out of the blue. I don't always understand why, but I don't try to fight it. Life is like a river and you either go with the stream or get pulled under, you know. It's tough to explain, but it dawns on you as you grow older. The shapelessness of existence, the idiosyncrasy of meaning and the ephemeral nature of desires are at the heart of Oklahoma poet Robert Spencer's collection Everything Used to Work and force is to admit he's explaining these things much better than I ever could.
Poetry has grown on me as an art form over the last couple years, but it's still quite uncomfortable for me to review so please bear with me. I will give it my best shot. The first thing that jumps out of the page about Everything Used to Work its powerful sense of place. Not only through his depictions of locales and landscape, but through his characters who are rotting and wasting away at the same pace than the world they live in. They drink, fight, fuck and destroy everything around them not because they're malevolent creatures, but because they're part of an self-destructing ecosystem. The world Robert Spencer created in Everything Used to Work is meant to burn and warm up its unsuspecting audience.
Everything Used to Work made me realize that sometimes poetry is the most efficient form to discuss certain themes. The tyranny of time and the violence of the ephemeral for example are two ideas that stand out from Robert Spencer's work and I don't think they would've been given a better treatment in prose. Spencer's characters, and to a certain extent all of us, live in a world that is sentenced to death and every other moment that structures, landscapes or people are falling apart holds a sacred beauty. Reading Everything Use to Work felt like taking a guided tour in a timeless place inhabited by picturesque evenings, broken furniture, eternal nights out and mean motherfuckers.
Of course, there is probably a part of Everything Used to Work's beauty that kept itself from my untrained eyes, but I've thoroughly enjoyed Robert Spencer's evocative and oddly versatile collection. Some of the poems in Everything Used to Work rhyme, some don't. Some are telling a story, others only capture a moment. Some are a couple pages long, others only a couple lines. It kept me on my toes and focused on every word. I'm still not taking poetry collections for review, but I don't mind stumbling upon the occasional one anymore. Those that bounce my way usually are happy accidents. Everything Used to Work is a fine study on the brittle part inside each of us that makes us human and a statement of purpose and pertinence for poetry in the 21st century.
