Josh Fomon, Our Human Shores

 

Absence makes of me a skeletal transmission. A future silence hummed into the ether.

In a fog of salt, the marsh blesses the morning. Reflects all our history, our inhuman attempt at living, the sentimental idea of power. We see nothing until it reveals itself or we seek out how far we can bleed. Human instead of human, another caterwaul clearing.

But this warm morning we wash ourselves against decaying concrete slabs. We watch misshapen waves pour flotsam foam over a rippled tide. We seep bleach and outdo the limits placed on us like the water-soaked logs piling on dead streets.

A flapping door wags its life awake—I step through the frame, the threshold that once stood here, once saw the ocean at a distance—the water slams it back close. Slams it open toward heaven. This music we search out, this magic humans hoard, but always this slamming, this brackish song, this throttling praise. This new way of living. (“Our Human Shores”)

The latest from Seattle poet Josh Fomon [see his 2018 ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here], following Though We Bled Meticulously (Boston MA: Black Ocean, 2016), is Our Human Shores (Black Ocean, 2025), a collection structured as a quartet of extended poem sequences—“Our Human Shores,” “The Memory Machine,” “Book of Skeletal Transmissions” and “The Somnambulist’s Lullaby.” Working through a narrative around the Anthropocene, Fomon explores extended poem-shapes and accumulations while examining human effect, environmental shifts, the limitations of writing and the way through which one writes the world. “My sweet catastrophe—,” begins one of the pieces in the second section, “a cascading cool summer lemonade / spills into a plague of ants.” Composed as assemblages of line-breaks, poems in open form, prose poems and sharp-edged couplets, I’m very taken by Fomon’s accumulations, and the fidelity of his lyrics, an offering of sharp observations shaped through both a directness and an indirectness, with a musical undertone across every quarter. “The book is an unwritten infidelity—,” he writes, as part of the third section, “a lie that anything can be complete—a benediction toward an infinite incompleteness written taut, gritted raw—a primal howl of caring enough to carry on to new horizons—the books beyond the books, a patient penitent scraping.” A directness, and an indirectness; and a single narrative through-line stretched and extended to impossible lengths. “How can we maintain distance when we don’t even understand where we stand? The madronas glisten best when they’re wet.”

There’s almost a way through which he writes around his larger subject, articulating an outline that can’t help but shape the book into a kind of absence, lines that circle around enough to highlight what is shown without showing. “The buffed-out metals / rusted through. / A belched-out mantra—,” he offers, as part of the second section, “It’s me. It’s me. It’s free. // Pressed new     conflagration within     the sorrow / we wait, we miss that which we don’t know is missing.”