The loss of a child is a life-altering experience, and such was certainly the case for award-winning poet Miller Oberman’s father, Mark, who lost his son Joshua at age two to accidental drowning. Mark left behind a memoir about the loss of Joshua, a document that was written near his own death and explained the pivotal moment in his life, and how it led him on a spiritual quest. The work, according to his son, the poet Oberman, is not a feat of literature, but in Oberman’s extremely capable hands, pieces of the work sing in new forms. These found poems make up a large part of the text of Impossible Things, Miller Oberman’s latest book after The Unstill Ones.
Impossible Things is many works in one. It is a resurrection of a brother lost before the poet could know him, it is a resurrection of a father so immobilized by this loss that Oberman found it difficult to relate to him until he became a father himself, it is a treatise on the silent pain of manhood from a trans-masculine perspective. Mostly, though, it is a book about that which we cannot know until it becomes our reality. Though Oberman has not lost a child like his father did, he begins to piece together the older man’s life in terms of understanding when he transitions, but also becomes a father as well.
Oberman’s two children show up frequently throughout the body of the text of Impossible Things, and Oberman muses on the fragility of children in the poem “History of Fingers.” In the poem, his daughter Rosie is hurt in a freak accident with a hydraulic table while he is at the doctor. The poem itself is a mirrored hall of all such accidents in the author’s family. These moments, however large or small, connect the author to his father’s great tragedy—the loss of Joshua. “Scream of the realization of unfixability itself,” Oberman says of his daughter’s accident, which could apply to any of the accidents of the poem, including Joshua’s death.
The book finds its way back to Joshua again and again. In the prologue, Oberman writes, “This is a story about how we get stuck in time, or parts of us. Pain nails us to a spot, and when we move from the spot, the nailed-down piece rips off.” Time, Oberman tells us, is queer, elastic. He writes when his first child is just a bit older than his dead brother will ever be, then again when his second child is the same age. The poems condense time into an accordion: now, Oberman is a father; now Oberman’s voice stands in for his father; now Oberman is a child being hit with rocks by other children; now Oberman is a father making a dinner of fried green tomatoes for his children on his dead brother’s birthday, a brother about which he knows few things for sure besides that he drowned and that he had just learned not to pick the tomatoes when they are green. This final fact, so delicate and loving, is repeated twice in the book.
Oberman speaks of horror here, too, often through the voice of his dead father. Many of the found poems from Oberman’s father’s memoir focus on the moment of his son’s death. The poem “Proper Identification” begins with an epigraph from The Jewish Mourner’s Handbook, which tells us “All branches of Judaism discourage the viewing of the body other than for proper identification. We are encouraged to remember our beloved ones in the vibrancy of their lives.” Later, in one of Oberman’s found poems, we are reminded that Oberman’s father was not allowed this dignity: “I’m still running down the road I’m / holding Joshua in my arms looking into those lifeless / dull blue eyes that had been so sparkly and alive.”
In the prologue, Oberman writes of the many forms this book has taken. At first, it was a questioning, a device to find out what happened to his brother, what happened to his father, how that tragedy echoed through generations. When little turned up of solid evidence, it became an attempt to share his father’s story—not just with the publication of pieces of his memoir, it seems, but to share in his father’s story, an active character in a tale of loss. The parallels between the men grow as the book goes on, as the form shifts from poems about newspaper articles and phone calls to people who might remember, to poems that link threads of Oberman’s man- and fatherhood and his own father’s.
The inability to truly know our parents is a ripe concept in literature, something timeless that most of us can relate to. Through drawing himself closer to his father in Impossible Things, Oberman offers the reader a chance to do the same as they read along, to ask questions there might not have been a time and place for while parents were alive, to tell stories that are not our own but which we are very much a part of, and to find parallels. As Oberman brings his father’s voice to life in a call he wishes he could make—and no longer can outside the scope of his poetry—we’re offered the chance to do the same.
POETRY
Impossible Things
By Miller Oberman
Duke University Press
Published October 22, 2024
