Tense Imperfect, by B.D. Fischer

Poetry, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

In B.D. Fischer’s Tense Imperfect, “Midwestrophe” is ruin at a domestic scale: slow, ordinary, and entirely survivable. The grammatical concept of the continuous past—what was happening, what keeps happening—is pressed into service as an emblem of adult life. The collection radiates outward from a heroin overdose that is two kinds of ending into the middle distance of Chicago apartment projects, condiments on grocery store shelves, and charity fundraisers.

Fischer’s monologists start funny and don’t stop. They hold forth on Sun Tzu and corporate culture, on novels they have not read, on a dog’s philosophy of fried chicken. They can name the myth of the given but cannot speak a single true thing at the kitchen table. What they declare instead is that they are “no one, just a great mask mouthing / the tense imperfect— / re sports, re traffic, re the weather.” But the jokes are not relief. They are the output of a man’s fear that he is just a machine, and they arrive at the rate of his despair.

The claim these poems make is that form tightens as life comes apart. The book opens in the loose sectioned free verse of an elegy and closes in rhymed quatrains and hard aphorisms—the prosody of a man straightening the house because the house is all that is left to straighten. It ends without resolution because survival is not a victory. It is just the maintenance that makes up a life.

B.D. Fischer lives in Uptown, Chicago, with his wife, dog, and son. His novel Slowly But Thoroughly is available from Strange Days Books.