Gardner, Nick. So Marvelously Far. Crisis Chronicles Press, 2019. $10. 64 Pages.

https://ccpress.blogspot.com/2019/11/gardner110.html

Review by Joe Neary

Nick Gardner’s book of poetry, So Marvelously Far, details his experience with opioid addiction. Rather than focusing solely on the details of the life of an addict, Gardner’s book traces the process of recovery. At the same time, this process is framed within the trajectory of his hometown of Mansfield, OH, which, in many ways, perfectly encapsulates the image of a midwestern rustbelt city that has been reshaped by deindustrialization.

In an interview with Richland Source, Gardner describes the experience of writing this book upon his return to Mansfield after rehab, “”I saw the revitalization of the city—a new bookstore, a new brewery, and realized in a way, I too was revitalizing myself: becoming a new life form in a way” (Jones).  The process of this realization is evident in the structure of Gardner’s book, which opens with poems centered on the experience of addiction, before progressing into what he terms “urban exploration” poems where he turns his focus to the landscape and cityscape around him, offering what he describes as “a deep look at the importance of place and the connections I feel with my hometown” (BGSU). The book then progresses into, and ends with, details on post-addiction life.

By framing both his addiction and his process of recovery within the landscape of his hometown, Gardner perfectly captures the dialectic relationship between personal subjectivity and the social and physical spaces one dwells within—a relationship that, ultimately, serves to configure one’s sense of self. This relationship is often overlooked in discussions of rustbelt life. By filling in this gap, Gardner offers a powerful new contribution to artistic representations of the post-industrial Midwest, as well as a profound look into the life of addiction that so often takes hold within this geographic area. Gardner’s unique vision shows how these towns and their ways of life, rather than needing to be left behind, must, instead, be fully embraced in all of their messiness and flaws, just like one’s past as an addict, if a brighter future is to be imagined and realized.

The book consists of 49 total poems, all of which initially began as sonnets. In an interview with Bowling Green State University (from which Gardner recently graduated with an MFA degree in creative writing), Gardner discusses his reasoning behind the decision to follow this format, saying, “I picked the sonnet form because it is short, but also constrictive. The form challenges how I express myself and I liked the idea of kind of a battle between what I want to say and how I can say it. Of course, I broke the form quite a bit, especially in revision. Sometimes there were things that needed to be said that broke down the walls of the form completely” (4).

The benefits of this decision to focus on form are evident from the very first pages of the book. In “Finding Faces in the Moon,” Gardner writes, “I can’t say I’ve ever seen anyone in the moon/ Ever. Saw, once, a glimmer of eye or/something like the beginnings of a smile/ the very start of his tiptoe out of gloom” (4). This spare, reserved language leads the reader to a sense of submersion—bringing them into the difficult experience of confronting one’s own addiction (a process that often amounts to confronting one’s way of thinking). This sensation is further heightened when Gardner writes, later in the poem, “But some nights, I look into the moon and see/ the red veins of a burned-out eye blazoned/ on a backdrop of that soft wax-yellow-skin” (4). Throughout the first section of the book, one can feel this continual sense of submersion into the mind of an addict hoping to change, but seeing his own sense of entrapment all around him. At the same time, the formal approach that Gardner takes keeps these desires and fears bottled up, placing them at arm’s length from his reader—something that highlights both the distance addicts often have from their own thought processes, as well as the somewhat unbridgeable gap between the mind of an addict and those around them.

 As the book progresses, Gardner’s growing ability, once in recovery, to own his past and to embrace the future becomes more evident. In, “Urban Exploration #5,” he writes, “We all came from something bare/ naked and scrambling to hide itself … Turning on the light for the first time/ in twenty years, we see the ballroom filled/ with pigeons and empty beer cans. We see/ newspapers from nineteen sixty-two. We/ see painted windows covering broken glass/ You cannot remove the past, only change it” (27). Evidenced, once again, is Gardner’s emphasis on the ways in which one crafts meaning through an interaction with the spaces around them. In this example, it is a recognition of the present’s infusion with the past that is reflected back to him by his hometown of Mansfield. By embracing Mansfield’s changes and the messiness of the very notion of change itself, including the ways in which change always brings remnants of the past along with it, Gardner offers a positive vision beyond personal addiction and collapsing cityscapes.

At the end of So Marvelously Far, Gardner writes, in the poem, “Looking at Ohio From the Other side of Lake Erie: Erieau, Ontario, Canada,” “I can think about/ myself: a nostalgic worrier, a/ tossing dreamer. I think on how to keep/ my world within my grasp like hugging a shy/ child who keeps wanting to run into train/ tracks. I have come so marvelously far” (61). The optimistic note here is paired with the recognition that recovery is an ongoing process—one that requires an ever-shifting relationship to oneself and the outer world. As Gardner’s book demonstrates, literature has a valuable role to play in this process, as it can serve as a powerful tool for relating to oneself and imagining a new future.

About the Author: Joe Neary is a recent graduate of Bowling Green State University’s MA program in Literary & Textual Studies and a contributing editor at Flyover Country.

Works Cited

Jones, Noah. “Mansfield poet publishes book about his and the city’s recovery.” Richland Source, 10 December 2019.

“MFA Student Nick Gardner Releases First Volume of Poetry.” Bowling Green State University, https://www.bgsu.edu/arts-and-sciences/english/news/mfa-student-nick-gardner-releases-first-volume-of-poetry.html. Accessed 6 July 2021.