Over/Time
by Jon Todd
Moonstone Press $10.00
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Reviewed by Brooke Palma
I am someone who enjoys writing on her lunch break. The finished poems (among the many fragments that remain confined to their life on borrowed legal tablets) feel like a stolen pleasure, like time snatched away and reclaimed as mine during the workday.
Several months ago, I was at Fergie’s Pub and heard Jon Todd read a few of his poems from his new chapbook Over/Time. I sensed a kindred spirit – a writer looking to take back what work has stolen from him and from all of us, too. Todd’s biography on the back of his chapbook confirms that these poems deal with observations mainly written between breaks as a way to try to find humanity outside of and within labor. See these lines from “Hack,”
The best stories I’ll have are of work,
because for years I’ve known nothing else,
and you smiled after that, because we were tired,
and had lost our money.
Over/Time explores the concept of work and its effect on the remainder of our daily lives in gripping and lyrical verse. Todd’s work shows the ways life lacks meaning, and that it is the work of poetry that attempts to give “…a brief spark, a reprieve from quiet certainty” to the mundaneness of our daily toil. The workers/narrators in this chapbook are loners and lost souls with “rough hands and blunt tongue[s]” who still want to make good on promises the world has broken.
My favorite poem from Over/Time is “300,” where Todd shows us the dingy, subterranean world beneath an orchestra performance center in which “you’ll be playing the part unseen beneath the music.” The narrator/laborer puts on a performance by himself, an unseen artist, who puts away, “…cases of wine while singing ‘which side are you on’ in 10 languages” and reminds us of his previous performance, “’Alcoholism in 4 parts.’” The beauty here is that the labor itself becomes elevated as a piece of performance art through the writing of this poem, in spite of the oppression of a capitalism that grinds workers down in pursuit of the commercial gains of art. The poem is an act of resistance against “an iron heel in Nike’s” and leaves us wanting an encore of this lonely performance.
Throughout Over/Time, there is a sense of longing for things to be different than they are. This longing, however, is grounded in the fact that despite our desire for life to be different, it will remain the same broken dream no matter what we do, which suffuses Todd’s poems with a sort of resigned beauty. As he writes in “Work,”
And you will get drunk / feel invincible,
and make plans to start over,
to build or make something,
detailed speech a blur,
…before giving up,
eating bread, and falling asleep with a desire,you can never recall in the morning.
Over/Time shows us that the struggle to make art, does not make our lives better, but it does make them meaningful.
Thanks to COVID-19, I’ve been working from home for the past several weeks. I anticipate being home for a while longer. I look forward to sneaking away to steal those minutes with words, and when I do, I hope to spend more minutes with Over/Time, hoping that its pages will help to add meaning to my own work. Frankly, though, just getting to read those words again will be a gift.
Brooke Palma grew up in Philadelphia and currently lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Many of her poems focus on the connections between culture and identity and finding beauty in the everyday. Her work has been published in The Mad Poets’ Review, Moonstone Arts, Toho Journal, and online at E-Verse Radio. Her chapbook, Conversations Unfinished, was published by Moonstone Press in August 2019. She hosts the Livin’ on Luck Poetry Series at Barnaby’s West Chester.