Buck Downs, exit style

 

nothing left to refund

      did you ever try
      to fix yourself

            and find out
      that doesn’t work

a purchase that looks
      like you found it

it shakes my whole body
like a chuck full of wood

The latest from Washington DC poet [and above/ground press author, I should add] Buck Downs is the self-published exit style (2025), following NICE NOSE (2023) [see my review of such here], the chapbook-length GREEDY MAN: selected poems (Brooklyn NY: Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks, 2023) [see my review of such here], OPEN CONTAINER (Washington DC: privately printed, 2019) [see my review of such here] and Unintended Empire: 1989-2012 (Baltimore MD: Furniture Press, 2018) [see my review of such here], among multiple other titles. Composed as seven cluster-sections of short poems—“shy boy,” “illucidations,” “little wages,” “’patacoustics,” ““For Bleachers”,” “this is not to say” and “exit style”—Downs’ has long been engaged with observational thinking, but one that provides a sense of continued, ongoing and interconnected meandering. “your dream should have / an exit plan,” he offers in the poem “sleepervescent,” “clinging / to the rock / of emptiness // return to dust / no other places / can I go / but where I come to [.]” His poems are composed as self-contained sharp moments, of wisdoms and self-aware questions and clarifications, that accumulate, even build, in a finely-tuned lyric across a perpetual engagement with the surrounding world and life’s possibilities. “I spread out / in my body / til I could feel / my presence / in every cell,” the poem “a piece in a pinch” offers, “the pressure / of cell on cell / compounding // it’s a find-me puzzle / I can’t quit matching [.]”

The brevity of Downs’ poems can be deceptive, almost obscuring, in plain sight, just how smart these poems really are, and have become over the years he’s been working, and almost set themselves in that space between knowing and unknowing, perpetually between dreaming and conscious thinking. There are echoes here of the observational language first-person movements of such as American poet William Carlos Williams in Downs’ short, clipped lines, or even certain elements of the work of Vancouver poet George Bowering and American poet Robert Creeley, or even the ghazal of the late east coast poet John Thompson, as Downs offers his own sequences of meditative response-moments in a particular, ongoing cadence, each poem set as its own kind of thought-sentence. Or the poem “this is not to say,” that writes:

      I know something
      I thought I knew
      before and how

            like knowing
            that the clock
                  is wrong
            but still you
      can’t tell the time –

      there was dope left
      for safe keeping
in a place where nobody
      would think to look,
ever – and later found
            by someone
      who wasn’t even
      trying to find it –