{"id":859,"date":"2022-08-31T15:06:08","date_gmt":"2022-08-31T19:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/?p=859"},"modified":"2022-08-31T15:06:35","modified_gmt":"2022-08-31T19:06:35","slug":"chapbook-review-all-small-planes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/chapbook-review-all-small-planes\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapbook Review: All Small Planes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>All Small Planes<\/em> by Eric Roy. Whitman, Massachusetts: Lily Poetry Review, 2021. 19 pages. $12.00, paperback.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Eric Roy begins <em>All Small Planes<\/em> with a statistic: 72,000 opioid deaths in America in 2017, which comes to 197 daily deaths, an death toll equivalent to a 737 jet fatally crashing every single day. But Roy\u2019s collection doesn\u2019t toss around rates as abstract signifiers of widespread tragedy; <em>All Small Planes<\/em> invites the opioid crisis into your living room, following the narrator\/speaker\u2019s brother\u2014nicknamed Small Plane after a childhood shoplifting incident\u2014as he bums cigarettes to his daughter at an airshow, exemplifies the Irish goodbye before a party\u2019s end, and crashes on the speaker\u2019s couch. After all, \u201cyou get the feeling at any moment \/ he could fall apart mid-flight. So, if not your couch \/ then crash where? A suburban lawn? Golf Course? \/ Mother\u2019s aging mall? The Pentagon\u2019s garage?\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Unfolding in just fifteen poems at one page apiece, All Small Planes tells a full story of nostalgia and grief while leaving much unsaid. Roy lets this brevity and quiet speak for itself, much like Small Plane and his daughter \u201cfinally having a decent conversation \/ but in the form of quickly fading black redacted clouds\u201d as they smoke together in silence while the airshow rushes overhead. Though conversational at first glance, Roy fills these poems with moments of sonic delight, gorgeous observation, and striking figurations of landscape: \u201cupside-down, \/ blue sky below no lake or ocean, the straight arm of horizon \/ beckoning his descent as he spirals for control.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Landing, crashing, taking off or being jumped from, Small Plane brings color and life to the statistic which begins the book. Whether or not we understand, beyond the numbers, just how widespread the opioid epidemic is, Roy\u2019s work reminds us what these losses look like on a human level, at the scale of daily life. Every day, this crisis touches more and more lives; <em>All Small Planes<\/em> is a collection both for those whose homes have only ever been brushed by graphs and data on a tv screen, as well as for those whose friends and family\u2014their stories, dreams, obsessions, and nicknames\u2014have been lost in the numbers.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>-Samuel Burt, MAR<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>All Small Planes by Eric Roy. Whitman, Massachusetts: Lily Poetry Review, 2021. 19 pages. $12.00, paperback.&nbsp; Eric Roy begins All&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[32,31,33,36,35,34,29,30],"class_list":["post-859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapbook-review","tag-all-small-planes","tag-chapbook","tag-eric-roy","tag-opioid-crisis","tag-opioid-epidemic","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=859"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":861,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859\/revisions\/861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}