Where bullets go: A review of Keith Stahl's FROM THE GUNROOM
From the Gunroom by Keith Stahl — Main Street Rag, April 2021
poetry / 76 pages / $14
reviewed by Rainie Oet
From the Gunroom, Keith Stahl’s debut book of poetry, is a wonderful collection of prose and verse constructed entirely using text from a gun manual. It is a hilariously alienating and magnetic meditation on the separation of self and other, masculinity, violence, and the longing for peace in a world where language itself is violent.
At first glance this book appears to be about guns, their uses and care. The deeper one dives into this book, the more the book’s subsurface comes to life. Peeling back the layers, which includes occasional marginalia commenting on the events of the poems, one realizes there are real characters here, living entire lives. Years pass, and childhoods—painful, magical—occur in the background:
I had a favorite game as a child in which I imagined I was water shot from a hose. I’d fly wild through the air, spinning and cartwheeling and jerking my body until I’d fall flat to the ground and vibrate. I soaked the world. I was the Maker of Jungles. But then, a jarring window-knock: “Get in the house! Play normal!” And so I would go inside and piece a puzzle, spin a top, or melt tiny German artillerymen with ferric chloride until they recoiled with shame and evaporated.
Sprinkled with gun trivia, lives turn around and around like bullets clicking into position in a revolver:
What I would give to have my child home again, a child again, to see him through the window wearing his little British artilleryman jacket, playing in the yard with his balls and machine gun...examining through a pocket lens the remains of a dead bird, his little cheeks discoloured by ammonium persulphate.
Family members struggle with addiction (“Twelve Steps to realize that I have no enhanced powers… Holes in the wall… show my unsuccessful history of trying to control others”), emotional and physical abuse, and the at-times inescapable gravity of past trauma:
I imagined I was a goose, flying through the snow, and for a time it was so extraordinarily freeing that I thought I might burst. Until some men spotted me. They raised their weapons, and pointed at full cock.
These characters also all attempt to heal themselves, using the very language of guns that contained their trauma: “On looking / through the barrels of my gun / I see my face. // How can I get rid of it?” This very absurdity describes the insanity of expecting the tools of violence to be used for untangling that violence. And yet, for these characters, there seem to be no other options. In the world of Stahl’s found-text, they must attempt to detoxify their lives within a toxic language.
The characters of this book obsess with guns to the point of warped sanity (“You left snipe, Jarvis, / smeared on the walls!”) and rely heavily on gun imagery and language to talk about their lives and feelings: “Everything falls so gently that it is not dangerous unless one happens to go looking upwards.” Stahl’s book itself goes looking upwards, to watch where bullets go after they are shot.
As per the project of this book, these characters literally have no other words they can use other than the words that appear in Stahl’s source text. Guns, in addition to their literal presences in this book, also stand in for violence and masculinity. A number of poems play with the conflation of guns and penises: “Big and powerful man. // While standing in a vertical position / squirt through the slots of the knuckle.” In this book, Stahl is highly critical of a type of masculinity that involves the kind of sureness that could inspire one animal (all people are animals, literally) to kill another for fun.
And yet Stahl’s book is incredibly playful: “My face is doughy. / I have that middle-aged spread. / But sometimes / I stand in the window / in just diamonds and gloves.” Evil is largely incredibly banal, and play can turn incredibly scary. Stahl mines humor from the incongruity between that banality and its life-altering consequences: a poem called “Remedy for Bruised Cheek” consists of the line “Stop banging your face.” Another poem offers the banality of a simple math problem:
Question 150.— The Guard in his van at the rear end of a train wishes to shoot the Engine Driver. The train is traveling at 60 m.p.h. and the Guard uses a revolver that also has a velocity of 60 m.p.h. Will the Guard be able to hit the Engine Driver?
Answer.— Of course he will, provided his aim is accurate.
Of the many narrative arcs of the book, the ones that strike me most are of characters trying to create change in their lives, making spaces of resistance against the ever-intrusive gun context:
I am so pleased that you, my child, are returning home. I must warn you that things are different. Jarvis has removed himself — rather, I have removed Jarvis. My independence has been a boon to me personally. I read more. I have admirers. I converted your old room into a sublime place for small birds to make their home.
These characters all find themselves unable to resist returning home, to what they know: “There seemed to be no harm in my leaving home… but in practice it has not proved satisfactory… I have now been doing my best to return home.” They try to escape but find themselves drawn back again and again: “The complete prevention / of patterns. / The almost complete prevention / of patterns. And the greatly increased regularity / of patterns.”
In the middle of these emotional arcs, the book wrestles with one fundamental question that it repeatedly asks its characters and readers: how does one live in a world so obsessed with toxic elements that it is impossible to fully separate oneself from what is toxic? Or, put another way: “Would you rather not have / been brought into this world— / never to experience / gaggling geese / cartwheeling from blue sky?” In this question is the awareness of the inescapable interconnectedness between the hunter and the hunted: “My small arms are fixed / with feathers. / I jerk them vigorously / to take flight.” Finally, the book’s closing line startles with its simple reckoning: “As the years have passed / I find that I miss / birds / I have killed.”
Rainie Oet is a nonbinary writer and the author of three books of poetry, most recently Glorious Veils of Diane (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2021). Read more at rainieoet.com.