Sean Moeller’s debut poetry collection Plain Clothes Hamburglar (Rejection Letters Press) is a tightly compressed collection of vignettes that are laden with beat, location and nostalgia to create an anthemic volume of poems that, despite their playful dressing, ask to be taken seriously.
Divided into sections by ingredients in a hamburger (bun, pickles and onions, meat, bun) and titled for a McDonald’s marketing character, the poems are unsurprisingly interested in themes of pop culture, but the packaging — the casual, everyday-ness of it — is misleading. Moeller’s poems are not drive-thru poems. They want to wrap around the reader’s mind, they want to give the reader pause. The wordplay is sometimes subtle double-entendres that only become clear when the poem is finished. Sometimes sound-alikes are used to subvert expectations. Other times, words are used in an unconventional way, asking the reader to reassess their meaning. The sentences often feel almost collaged together, building upon each other with disparate but thematically similar elements. Sometimes narrative, the poems nearly always meander into sound and image-based compositions, and vice versa.
Plainclothes Hamburglar, written by someone from my hometown, manages to accurately represent an urban Midwest melancholy without explicitly stating its geography. This has the effect of grounding a collection that often shows off its abstractness.
In the poem “WHERE WILL YOUR POOL BE,” Moeller transitions from a bridge shut down “for a jumper” — a bridge I recognized — into the line, “There are those who dig their swimming pools right next to the ocean… They want more than solace and residue. They need more than the midnight mass and fries by the pound.” This juxtaposition of ideas about what we take for granted was striking, and then faded in and out of other snapshots of gratitude, humanity and mortality.
There’s a soft darkness to the scenes we witness here that doesn’t quite, but almost, romanticize alcoholism, the culture of it, the pain that comes with returning to the places in which we come of age. This collection aggressively requested nostalgia from me, placing me in familiar sites of late nights and sadness — a fervent chant, a desperation for the life that comes with youth and often fades with the complacency of age. Interested in the mundane, these poems suggest that what is ordinary is more evocative.
Plainclothes Hamburglar straddles the lines between youth and middle age, playfulness and seriousness, pessimism and hope. We can be all of these things. If the collection has a mission statement, it is delivered in the poem “I BET ON THE LONELYHEARTS AND DIRTY WORDS,” “I bet on the lonelyhearts and dirty words, for the way they land, for the distinct way they can deliver mouth-to-mouth in the middle of a blizzard. I bet on the stink and living decay of our neighbors… All I want to be in another month is a disturbance, not just colder.”
This collection might not always have faith in the world that made it, but it tries to. It trusts this place to hold it.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s June 2025 issue.
