THE BIG MISTAKE, by Tessa Morello

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

A physicist, a surge barrier, the Elephant’s Foot, or a dog, Henry is whatever you want him to be. Sometimes, Henry is the poet, too.

In THE BIG MISTAKE, the uncertain identity of Henry is central as it wobbles between a collection of verse, prose poem, and aphoristic prose. Far from being a character, Henry is real because of his unknowability. It is in the holes that perforate the structural instability of his identity that the reader is invited to enter and join him as he wades through the dense waters of pop cultural, literary, and theoretical references in that eternal search for self-determination and meaning. Fluctuating wildly between Henry’s addiction and asceticism, each piece interrogates his motivations and behaviors, not always kindly, bringing him, and the reader, closer to an unspeakable truth, though never arriving at it entirely.

The titular “big mistake” is the one that you keep making over and over again, almost as though outside of your control. But THE BIG MISTAKE is not a hopeless rumination. Rather, it is a question that believes in the inevitability of its answer. It asks, optimistically if in bleak tones: What does it take for it to be your own hands on the steering wheel of the car?

Tessa Morello is an English literature and creative writing student at Miami University. Their work can be found in the third issue of Scavengers and the 75th issue of The Penn Review. When not writing, reading, or thinking about poetry, they spend their time making coffee, missing their cat Green Beans, and formatting text over images for their semi-satirical Instagram @catgirlhannibal.