This January, while visiting Tulsa with a friend, I made an effort to reconnect with my redneck roots. We went firing at an indoor gun range. Across the street was a church with a sign announcing the coming of its gun sale. Later, at the tattoo parlor, as his own gun pierced me with a cool proficiency, the tattooist proved dismayed at our choice of gun range: a notoriously sketchy outfit, it turned out, where a few weeks previously a patron had shot his two friends, and then himself, dead inside its skinny, single-exit firing hall. The night ended with a pilgrimage to the old headquarters of the Oral Roberts Ministry, for a time the most energetic promulgator of rightwing American evangelical Christianity. Today the building is in ruins: a squat, sinister, windowless brick inlaid with white diamond lacing, which is itself likely laced with asbestos.
This is the kind of day, and the kind of condemned building, you can easily imagine a teenaged Justin Carter having and hanging around. Carter, now grown and Iowa-based, is the author of the debut poetry collection Brazos (Belle Point Press), and a young man of Carter’s background is often the protagonist of this ruminative meditation on the speaker’s relationship to his native Texas Gulf Coast — into which runs the titular Brazos river, like a razor-inflicted diagonal slash down the flesh of Texas.
To fill out the speaker’s day, you would need to add the sub rosa administration of graffiti, as well as a large number of cheap beer brands, about which Carter displays a charming erudition. For much of the collection’s span, one finds oneself requesting a stern word with the wayward youth. The reader’s consternation climaxes with the prose poem “Trash Fires.” The poem teaches us to read its title as a complete sentence: “We learned aerosol cans sound like gunshots when burnt.”
It’s a happy thing that the young man wound up a talented poet. But I don’t want to mislead; only some of the poems undertake the sociology of the nogoodnik. Others are lyrical reconstructions of childhood memory, while still others track the rightward drift of our politics — as in another prose poem, based on real events, in which a local paranoid with, naturally, a seat on the school board “[says] the talking doll she bought said Islam is the light when its string was pulled.”
The volume works hard to evoke its time and place through the accretion of physical detail: not only “Miller Lite & motor oil” (sometimes the poems excessively signal their blue-collar milieu), but also more offbeat objects, like the speaker’s grandmother’s “combination radio & can opener.” These, too, were real. And the one in this poem evokes cannily well a sense of its owner. Who among us has had no relative touched by the harmlessly irrational love of the two-in-one gizmo?
Carter is interested in both hidden words and in what words hide. Like many of his contemporaries, he is concerned about what declarations of collectivity leave out: “there’s this gulf between the classes that can’t be bridged by the word y’all.” (This suspicion has fortunately not prevented him from including two poems on sports, an underdeveloped topic in American poetry.) In what I found the book’s strongest section, a series of elliptical couplets about a case of adultery (“Homestead”), the guilty party contemplates “the seven-letter word for why // you can never fit together the way / you want. Hint: it begins h, ends -band.” The second line break draws our attention to the different relevant senses of the split phrase: “the way you want to fit together,” but also “the form of your desire.” The suppressed “us” inside of “husband” surfaces in the final poem of the sequence: “So this, // he said. Us. It isn’t that bad. / Isn’t most love a little fucked up?”
A late poem references the speaker’s move to a certain “state with four letters & three vowels.” For all his love of occluded words, this assured debut gives readers reason to hope Carter will continue unoccluding his own.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2024 issue.
