Every Living Day
Thirty West Publishing House
$16.99
You can purchase your copy here.
Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan
Some poetry collections distill the everyday into a potent elixir or essence, and Adam Gianforcaro with his astounding full-length collection, Every Living Day, does exactly that. Whether he describes mowing the lawn, sitting poolside with contemporary fiction, or receiving a deep tissue massage, Gianforcaro writes with such crystalline precision, all the reader can do is gasp at the power of his diction and a moment of self-realization. His weighty themes include the environment, and the huge metaphysical obsession, time.
In the title poem, Gianforcaro hauntingly writes about the terrified (and terrifying) apathy we can often experience while pondering climate change:
When I can no longer kneel, I will wade myself
towards repentance—beg forgiveness
for folding banana peels in tin foil
for drinking coffee from a Keurig.
Every living day I fuck the earth with negligence.
Power in poetry often comes from a narrator’s complicity as Gianforcaro is well aware. He mentions other examples of how he “fucks the earth” by mowing over a mouse with his lawnmower, and “fall[ing] victim to fast fashion and Amazon Prime.” This poem ends with a rare perfect couplet: “And to give up that convenience, to do no harm/I’ll pretend to not know the answer when I ask, but how”?
In “Human History as Deep Tissue Massage,” Gianforcaro obliquely references the climate by way of an extended poem-length metaphor comparing human history, or perception of time itself, to a deep tissue massage. This brief, psychologically loaded poem explores the exquisite “relief between bursts of pointed pain./And before you know it time runs out…The smell of lavender fields and burning.” As a reader, I have had read few lines that drive home the real, menacing, slow-but-fast, existential dread of climate change. In his own way, Gianforcaro is an eco-warrior, looking at the danger our planet is facing without flinching.
Carrying on with the political themes that course through his poems, Gianforcaro examines modern queerness in “Queer Love Story.” As a queer poet myself, I always cheer when I come across an explicitly queer poem in a collection. In this complex poem, both religion and pop culture are brought into the mix. Across several couplets, the reader is led from “discrete everymen with harps” to “prophets picnicking with gasoline” to “dogma dangles us from the balcony/like the King of Pop.” The metaphors in Every Living Day are rich, surprising, and varied. “Queer Love Story” is both satirical and polemic in all the best ways. It ends with the strident lines:
Queer kids
spell trauma for every camera
they see. Anchors ask, What is it like
to kiss with the forked tongue of a sinner?
Like heaven, we say. Like a burning.
Some of my favorite poets are prophets: Whitman, Ginsburg, Dickinson. I have a new name to add to that list: Gianforcaro. Since the event had been saturated with a climatically anomalous rain (and media coverage), the poem “Not Everyone Thinks of the Festival When Hearing About Burning Man” leapt out at me. It also contains one of my favorite sequences in the collection:
Homos, heretics: human
bodies as woodpile,
as Sunday matinee.
Twigs piled and pressed
like lovers in heat
But I am afraid of fire
so I dress it in drag.
Those lines pull in so much of queer experience that I am dizzied and dazzled. Few things mean more to me as a poetry reader than an illumination into the queer past and future. I think this poem captures the apocalyptic vibes that occur throughout the book. As a reader, the poem “Poolside with a Paperback” called to me. But to be honest, so many of these poems called to me. In this poem, the narrator is tackling DeLillo:
Soon a chemical cloud
will enter the novel. I think, Yes of course. And I consider
the sun, count the willful ways it harms and heals.
Like a kind of lover, and entire government.
Gianforcaro weaves in some of DeLillo’s own prophetic words. I think one of the best things a writer can do is call out the inspiration of other writers. I have my own collegiate beef with DeLillo, but in light of this poem, I will give him another chance. Thank you, Adam, for this gift.
Talking about gifts, I think Every Living Day is one. It is deep, metaphysical, yet accessible and compulsively readable. Best of all, to me at least, it’s unabashedly queer. Of all the reviews I have written, this one was one of the easiest and hardest to write. Easiest since I found so much to love; hardest because there were too many poems to chose for in a review. I commend Adam Gianforcaro on a masterpiece. I think the least any reader of this review can do is drink from his enchanted well.
Sean Hanrahan is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collection Safer Behind Popcorn (2019 Cajun Mutt Press) and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone Press) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). His work has also been included in several anthologies, including Moonstone Featured Poets, Queer Around the World, and Stonewall’s Legacy, and several journals, including Impossible Archetype, Mobius, Peculiar, Poetica Review, and Voicemail Poems. He has taught classes titled A Chapbook in 49 Days and Ekphrastic Poetry and hosted poetry events throughout Philadelphia.