For a Second, In the Dark is a distinct collection of poems in which Alec Hershman takes us on a daunting yet humorous journey through reality.
Released in October 2023 by MWC Press, For a Second, in the Dark marks Hershman’s third publication. It was published as the 2021 Foster-Stahl Chapbook Series Editor’s Choice Selection for Rock Island, Illinois’ Midwest Writing Center. [Ed. note: This reviewer worked in the internship program for the Midwest Writing Center over the summer of 2023, but had no connection to MWC Press or to this release.]
Imagery of bowling ball-like police officers, pulsing tomato beds and wealthy pigs assist in depicting how people are simply pawns in society, both victims and prey to the cruelty and dreariness that life has to offer. In the poem “Natural Selection,” Hershman observes humanity’s absolute fate:
Is this the replica? Puppets are ingesting
other puppets, and the whole cast, it seems,
Is strung on one string that runs gut to throat.
It is through the calls of nature, like the flash of thunder or the heavy rustling of trees, that ground the individual: or rather, bring a psychedelic awareness to their misery. Yet trembling ponds, knotted birds and milk-soaked forests slowly begin to play into this destructiveness.
The most memorable poem is “To The Sky His Druzy Forehead,” a piece committed to the normalization of detaching from the world around us as all of it passes without influence (“By some point it seems too quickly / we replace the people in our days”). The scene is set with the un-thrilling removal of a neighbor by the police from his home, as he is suspected of poisoning his wife.
The speaker’s lack of regard for such a heinous incident is rationalized in the last stanza, where strangers are compared to vapor, lasting only seconds, barely visible in the first place. In contrast, a quick but dark interaction becomes permanent, like an annoying rhyme you can’t seem to forget, running through your mind at random.
This grappling with bystander ethics becomes all the more poignant when paired with the eerie coincidence of the collection’s title. In 2022, after this collection was submitted for consideration in the Foster-Stahl series, but before it was ultimately published, one of the officers involved in the death of Breonna Taylor published a memoir of that 2020 incident. The title? 12 Seconds in the Dark.
It seems unlikely that Herschman intended For a Second, In the Dark as an intentional reference. (The title comes from a line in a poem about an elevator.) But that only heightens the discomfort of recognizing the coincidence.
In the second set of poems, Hershman offers a view far more centered on the speaker’s thoughts and experiences. Once a builder of log homes and Christmas display models, the speaker finds himself the cotton snow forced onto the pre-built world.
Despite the harsh truths he explores, Hershman’s poems offer us hope. For a second, in the dark, we revert to the tender beings we were born as, forgetting to wear the suits tailored for us by society’s merciless designer. We realize we have a role to play, however small it seems: not in a world of puppet masters, but among the forces of the natural world.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s January 2024 issue.
