Read This: An Urgent Request by Sarah Luczaj

An Urgent Request ($10) is not only the debut chapbook from British poet Sarah Luczaj, but also the debut of poet Cecilia Woloch's Fortunate Daughter imprint for Tebot Bach, the SoCal poetry nonprofit and press. Both Luczaj and Woloch should be very proud because An Urgent Request is something quite special.

The poems in the chapbook are indeed urgent and you will read this in one sitting, hurriedly turning the page to get to the next one. Then you'll start from the beginning and read again, more slowly, letting these short, elegiac poems sink into your brain. As the title poem commands, Deliver those words please/I cannot wait any longer. And Luczaj delivers for 24 pages with nary a lemon in the bunch. Every poem and word is urgent and essential.

Luczaj's observations -- to quote Whitman -- contain multitudes, even in simple lines like, No one I love/has died so far today from "My Life is Brilliant" or in the admonition in "How To Take Control of Your Life":

Be careless. Always

wear clean underwear

in case you get run over.

Listen, don't listen.

Don't wear underwear.

Don't get run over.

There is a sense of loss and of missing the dead (which is the title of a poem in this collection), but again there is the urgency to move forward as in "Barking Back," where an epigraph by G.P. Taylor warns against walking the "black dog" of depression:

Oh my god,

I'm breathing. I'm getting up

now with my palms open

and my boots on.

I chose "For José Drouet" because it is stunning in its simplicity and tone. Even typing it up for this review, I had to stop and catch my breath. Any poem that can do that is worth its weight in gold, but to find an entire chapbook of them is priceless.

For José Drouet

(1968-1989)

José, the light is moving in the water

José I carved a poem in the walls of a room

the room was dust

and the planets were

trapped as the people

in it and it broke

on them, and the room

broke on the sky which

is made of dirt as

the room is made of

dirt and the people

are made of dirt

and also the stars

it broke

on your body made of stars

José and now the words

are set in those walls

forever, too deep, and no one

is allowed to stand

between them, my room

sits alone in the city

José the light is moving in the water

and you are a mouthful

a handful now, a scattering

I wanted to tell you this

José who broke the windows

José the room was dust