Pain is universal. Despite its harrowing nature, pain is meant to protect us, to teach us, to heal us even. Josh Martin’s Vapor unveils a brutal yet beautiful portrait of the author trying to come to grips with overwhelming pain and its effects. The poetry within this chapbook drifts somewhere between the surreal and the all too real; a dreamscape inhabited by unfulfilled expectations and heartbreak. Throughout the book’s 19 poems, we find Martin confronting these themes head-on as he reflects on precise moments that caused so much distress. There is no denying that there is an underlying melancholy to Martin’s ruminations, yet he does not simply dwell sorrowfully about the state he finds himself in. Rather, Martin’s work seeks to understand how and why he got to this painful state. The theme at the heart of Vapor is Martin's attempt to learn a lesson that his pain was unable to teach him.
Martin’s steady hand and lyrical gifts have crafted a fascinating narration for his journey. One of Martin’s most creative techniques is connecting the emotions of the poems to basic elements and actions of our physical world. He uses this to not only distort those emotions, but to emphasize them as well. By tying such overbearing emotions into common non-living things, Martin is able to ground them in a world the reader can relate to. For example, his feelings in the first poem “Not Knocking” are reinforced by temperature. Martin is frozen with regret but cannot bring himself to go after the warmth he so strongly desires:
….I was standing
wanting to knock but never
wanting to be heard or seen again
by anyone or you or to touch
warm skin because the cold
was numbing enough to stop me
from knocking…
…knowing you would let me in again
if I told you I was frozen
if I showed you I was broken
enough that if you let me go
I’d die out in the cold.
The reader can relate to the pain in this piece because it is connected to a coldness they have felt before. Vapor can make you feel every emotion it wants you to without ever mentioning it by name. You can feel a punch to the gut that is represented by an arrow in “Groan”. You can feel the shame of unrequited love when Martin looks around the room in “Slow Dance”. You can feel the unrest from the heat in “Night Sweats”. You can feel his uncertainty as he grapples with how he presents himself in “Watercolor Eye”.
This brings us to an especially important example of this manifestation that you will find throughout Vapor: water. From start to finish the book references oceans, tears, waves, sweat, and rain. These forms of water often allude to Martin’s state of mind as it ebbs and flows through each piece. For example, you will find vastness and instability in the last lines of the poem “Overcast”:
you can’t kill the void with something liquid
can’t drown out the empty
by swallowing the rain.
Yet, you can also find a burgeoning optimism within “Indian Beach-September 7”:
So I sat upon a stone
tired bones pulsing with the Pacific
tickled by Poseidon’s dainty whims
I grinned
By using water and other metaphors to reshape his reality, Martin is able to draw the reader into the same fluid space that he himself embodies within Vapor. He wants to show you his deepest pain, but he does not want you to drown in it.
As I mentioned earlier, Martin imbues Vapor with touches of surrealness that allows him to create some respite from the emotional toll the pieces carry. In these moments, Martin’s language lifts his poems above simple emoting. Take for instance these lines from “Imperfect Blue”. While the yearning in this piece is palpable, the dreamlike imagery twists its feelings into a rhythmic poetry that allows the reader not to be overcome by it:
shriveling at the wrists while
conducting a quiet choir, listening
for hypnotic knocks of water drop-
lets oozing past
the blue stained glass and I
have something to be missing.
I ache
for saturation.
As much as Vapor is awash with Martin’s pain and his apprehension of it, by the end of the book the poems begin to strike a more forgiving and confessional tone. “Petrichor” allows Martin to release his pain as if it were a breath he had been holding in. “Stone” finds him skipping a stone across a creek in a cathartic letting go of his past. It is as if Martin has awakened from his dreams (or nightmares) and is learning how to not only live with his pain, but to conquer it. After so much time adrift, he is finally finding solid ground to stand on. In the last poem “Parts”, it appears Martin has arrived at an understanding, maybe even a peace:
The truth is that when we break
no matter where we are
what pieces we pick up
to take with us
it’s the parts we put together
that make us
that define us on our way
to finally making sense
of something.
Through talking with Martin, I learned that the poems collected in Vapor are older pieces that were written during a difficult period in his life. He was not quite sure if they were representative of both the writer and the person he is today. Yet, he also had an extremely deep connection with the poems that he just could not shake. He realized that if he wanted to move on personally and professionally, he needed to learn the lesson his pain was trying to teach him. While Vapor can be an arduous journey through Martin’s subconscious, it is also a deft and pulsating collection of poetry that strives to connect with its reader instead of alienating them. Its intensity might guide you to the edge of the abyss from which these poems came, but Martin’s creative verse and underlying humanity will be there to make sure you do not fall in.
Philip Dykhouse lives in Philadelphia. His chapbook Bury Me Here was published and released by Toho Publishing in early 2020. His work has appeared in Toho Journal, Moonstone Press, everseradio.com, and Spiral Poetry. He was the featured reader for the Dead Bards of Philadelphia at the 2018 Philadelphia Poetry Festival.