The Beginning of Undoing

In The Beginning of Undoing, John Milkereit writes poems that center the tempo, isolation and longing of our world. These narrative and lyrical pieces travel time and space to provide windows into the speaker's childhood, early adulthood, and more current glimpses of life.

In the poem, "If Life Is So Much More Evaluation Than It Appears, Why Isn't There a Hotline to Call?" Milkereit explores demands on our pace. I like this line in particular: "I was born in slowness; it only / worsened as it sped up." And the poem's end: "And here I am, the last / one left in the theater, clapping my hands at the empty chairs."

Earlier in the collection, I found "The Model Railroad" a nice capsule of childhood whimsy and a longing to explore. We see a model railroad that folds into the wall and a pet mouse who wanders the train set town unnoticed. The poem takes a lovely turn at the end describing its model residents: "They had never been to France or seen / a play, and neither had their operator, not yet / since memory hadn't arrived."

There's a moment in the poem "Against Isolation" that's stuck with me. The speaker gives us a portrait of early adulthood, a first car purchase, a blind date, and then an endearing bit of reality: "I was 24, living in / Shreveport, barely getting into the economy, / buying packs of cigarettes for my neighbor if / she agreed to cook before we watched / Murder, She Wrote..." How utterly relatable. We don't often get poems that describe such a common scene of both warmth and isolation.

These poems understand life's moments of boredom and uplift. They made me think about the value of life on pause: the model train in stasis, the empty movie theater, the comfort of watching TV with anyone by our side.