Reviews

Little Poem Press

“Like polishing stones with words”: so this collection signals its implicit task. Such words would have to have grit, abrasives, in them, and these poems are often hard: they refuse complacency. Wisely, they enact the dramas by which words and reality—desire and circumstance—are inextricably bound up:

how easy a fact turns into a story,
and a story turns into a fact—
the burden of things that happen
in my head.

But if writing itself is an issue in these poems, it stems not from that tired, narcissistic chic of self-reflexiveness, but from the urgency of the endeavor—the real struggle that honest communication requires. The honesty is this: if there is a divine perfection, we can only approach it from human imperfection. And so, as the title suggests, this is a study of brokenness, in the way that (as one poem points out) the Book of Revelation is also a book of destruction. The knowledge (Latin: scientia) gained here is a vision of love, rendered through Todd Heldt’s masterly command of tonality.

--William Wenthe, author of Not Till We Are Lost and Birds of Hoboken.

How do we live in a world that tempts us with transcendence even as it demands that we accept being our own passage? There is no way to love but the hard way, and Todd Heldt's poems discover that the pursuit of meaning is identical to the attainment of love. He does not insist that we overcome the so-called human condition but that we learn the difference between false dilemmas and genuine ones, finding poignancy in recognizing that our limitations, if not fully comprehensible, have an inviolable comprehending power. These well-crafted poems suggest that poetry itself is the science of broken people, is the means for deliberating about the ends to which we know we don't deserve to come, but from which we can attain much more than what might have been.

--Gale Acuff, author of Buffalo Nickel

I have an affinity for things that are vaguely gothic in the Faulknerian sense, and these poems fit the bill. Ghostly train-wrecks and car crashes, crosses lining the road...all filtered through a richness of language, image and rhythm that's incredibly haunting. I get the feeling that the speaker in these poems lives inside them and makes them breathe, which is a sense I don't get with a lot of work I've seen--the "oh, I'm so cool, let me tell you about the mundane minutae of my daily life" school of poetry. These poems are important and engaging, every single damn one.

--Kristy Bowen, author of Bloody Mary (Dancing Girl Press, 2004) and The Archaeologist's Daughter (forthcoming, Moon Journal Press).

All poets write about sex, religion, and death. These are universal fears and thrills. But Heldt writes from experience--the death of his friends, time lost in white hospital rooms, and rebirth, and that image that comes up again and again in his poetry - one life lost to save the life of another:
I wished / I were one of the paramedics / touching her face like ice / afraid it would melt in my palms / or one of the policeman -- / anything to bring me closer...
He writes with passion--with beautiful images and hard juxtapositions....His words are scar tissue, expelled, wrenched from somewhere between the heart and the sternum, or just beneath the blood-brain barrier. He tells us we are all as empty as we choose to be:
Don't worry, mister./Nobody's dead here but us.

Rachel Kendall, editor of Sein und Werden

"These poems will move you, will get in under your skin and stay there for a good long while."

--Feithline Stuart, editor of Saucy Vox

Walking Again
self-released audio CD


Something of the recklessness of a life pushed and felt to its limits presses against Heldt's words. I'm startled when I read or listen to his poetry. . .startled by the way his words are forced to convey pain, humiliation and tenderness; startled, also, by the leaps he makes, by the easy way he accesses God: out of the dust of Lubbock, Texas, out of a nude modeling session, out of. . .a dead blue jay at the bus depot or dead robins in the backyard. Heldt finds in the most banally depressing of moments more than just poetry; he finds truth - like how, as violence begets violence, the victims are increasingly innocent. His poetry breaks your heart, but it never stops being unbearably funny, such as this line from "Junior High Achievement Award":
"That night my dad asked/why I smelled like piss,/so I prayed to die." These words, which are about survival, celebrate all of us in our most lost, frightened moments; they teach us how language heals.

-- Bob Koehler, writes a syndicated column called "Common Wonders,"
and has won awards for journalism and fiction.

Fuck you you shit for brains fucking loser asshole! Nobody will ever give a fucking shit about you....You are a self centered piece of crap who has never done anything for anybody. My job IS poetry, you dumb garbage mouthed sick demented lobotomy case. For you it's just a fucking hobby, but for me it's a life. Your time is going to come, you scum bag!

-- CJ Laity, the guy who runs Chicagopoetry.com. I wonder if he is drinking again.