The Things we Carry

There is a kind of feeling that does not announce itself. It arrives in the grocery store on a Thursday afternoon when your hand reaches for something you always bought because someone you loved liked it - and stops. It arrives at three in the morning in the particular silence of a bed that has learned to hold one person instead of two. It arrives at the door you close behind your child when they leave for good and the house becomes a different shape around you.
It arrives on a long drive with a father who never said the words but was always, reliably, completely there. The Things We Carry is a debut collection of fifty lyric poems by IOAKIM IOAKIM, written in the full and undecorated language of the human interior - the feelings that live underneath the ordinary day and that ordinary language, in its hurry to be useful, tends to pass over. Arranged in twelve parts - Romantic Love, Lovers, Heartbreak, Divorce, Mother, Father, Nature, Grief, Loneliness, Joy, Age and Home - the collection moves through the complete emotional geography of a life lived honestly.
It does not flinch from the difficult territories - the long unglamorous middle of a marriage, the paperwork of divorce, the specific weight of a grief that arrives not in one wave but in ten thousand small ambushes - and it does not dress them up. But it does not dwell in darkness either. These are poems that understand that the October sea is more beautiful than the summer one precisely because it has stopped performing.
That the garden in winter is not dead but doing its root work. That the small joys - the first coffee of the day, the laugh that takes over the whole face, the dog who has never once moderated its response to you - are as worthy of the long lyric line as any tragedy. The poems in this collection are long and full of feeling, written in the tradition of the great lyric poets who understood that the interior life requires space - that a feeling compressed into four lines loses the thing that makes it true, and that the truest things ask to be sat with, breathed with, followed to wherever they actually lead.
The Things We Carry is for everyone who has loved someone and run out of words for it. For everyone who has lost someone and found the loss in the smallest most unexpected places. For everyone who has stood at the edge of something vast - the sea, a decision, a grief, a joy - and felt, briefly and completely, the particular rightness of being alive and human and entirely, irreducibly here. These are poems for the moments that make us.
IOAKIM IOAKIM's debut collection.