reviewed by Isaac Fox
Amorak Huey’s 2019 poetry collection Boom Box is a plunge into the tiny, tiny world of small-town Alabama in the 1980s. Immersed in crushing suburban expectations, hypermasculine posturing, rotting infrastructure, White rage, and a town full of churches, a young Huey comes of age, taking comfort in TV and rock-and-roll. Boom Box doesn’t give readers any respite from that timespan and that tiny town: the only body of water is the Cahaba River; the only people are judgmental, judged, trapped, sexually frustrated, and disenfranchised; and the only place is Trussville, Alabama.
Boom Box is split into two halves. The first focuses primarily on Huey’s early childhood, his parents’ divorce, and television. The second is more interested in his later teenage years, his early misadventures in finding love, and rock-and-roll as an expression of those feelings. Both halves are connected by a sense of alienation that is expressed perhaps most keenly in “All Weather Wants to Be Some Other Kind of Weather,” which centers around a boy who may or may not be a young Huey referred to in the third person. “[F]or the rest of his life,” Huey writes, the boy “will pretend there was a time / when he was comfortable in his skin– / a season that was not about waiting / for the wind to change– / a moment unshaped by hunger.”
Young Huey’s life and slightly older Huey’s life are also united by pop culture and the multitude of roles it played (and plays) for him. Again and again, he connects rock music and the big screen to his own life, most obviously in pieces like “Portrait of My Father as Tatooine” and “Self-Portrait as Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie.” Through these connections, he processes and expresses feelings that might feel difficult or impossible to face unmitigated. In “Portrait of My Brother as Indiana Jones,” for example, he makes sense of his brother’s entire life story—from childhood innocence, to the economic struggles of early adulthood, to cancer treatments—by connecting it to the iconic Steven Spielberg character. Similarly, “The Existence of Han Solo Explains the Universe” poses Han Solo’s hedonistic cynicism as a rational (and tempting) response to a meaningless, hard world.
Even as Huey uses storytelling as a method of processing and coping with difficult emotions, he critiques narrative, arguing that it fails to describe the unpredictability of life. “Our faith / in storytelling is misplaced,” he writes in “How Things Turned Out.” When it comes to Han Solo, “The movie gets it all wrong / and the sequels are someone else’s dreams— / there’s a limit to how much truth we can stand.” A Han Solo who changes—a Han Solo who takes heroic action, has principles, and believes in anything remotely like a higher power—is no longer Han Solo. The true Han Solo, according to Huey, is the crotchety old man across the street, who has no one to love and lives entirely for himself in a rotting, foreclosed house. The simultaneous rationality and pathetic selfishness of that kind of life is too unpalatable to appear in a mass-marketed story, but all too real in Trussville.
In his later teens, Huey uses rock-and-roll as an outlet for some very teenaged feelings: sexual frustration and anger at his constrained life and home. Pop culture also provides a narrow window to the outside world for him (further narrowed by the fact that all of this takes place in the pre-internet 1980s, when the world ran on word of mouth). And in the present, Huey seems to be processing these memories of his difficult coming of age in a similar way, albeit through a different medium and from the opposite side of the artistic process. Instead of listening to rock and roll, he’s now writing poems.
On a stylistic level, the lines and sentences in Boom Box are relatively simple and straightforward. Huey’s poems take on a variety of forms—some in couplets, tercets, or quatrains, others in one long stanza, staggered lines, or even prose—but no matter the form, the language is clear and often unadorned. However, despite this lack of linguistic glitter, Huey’s sentences and phrases are effective and quietly beautiful. He uses line breaks, in particular, to stunning effect. In “To All the Boys Who Died Before Graduation”—a weighty poem highlighting the ephemerality and uncertainty of everything other than sex and death—Huey repeatedly uses line and stanza breaks to create double meanings. “We were motherfucking immortal,” he writes, “and still / we knew everything // would be ripped away.” Similarly, another set of lines later in the poem read: “and all we knew of love was enough / to rhyme lips and fingertips.” This second set of lines highlights the disparity between teenage delusions and reality. Young Huey and his friends believed that they understood love, that their knowledge on the subject was “enough”; they now know that they may have understood lust, but any knowledge of love they had was superficial at best. These drastic double meanings complement the sense of alienation running through these poems: the jarring discomfort, the unpredictability, the lack of one true and singular meaning.
Huey consistently denies readers that one true and singular meaning, just as it’s been denied to him. Almost every sentence in “Crimes I Did Not Commit” begins with some variation on “I did not …” or “I have never….” These statements can be read as sincere denial, as something more dishonest or ironic creeping into the narrative voice, or as a blend of sincerity and insincerity. Many of the events the narrator “didn’t” do are events repeatedly described elsewhere in the collection. “There was no hurricane,” he writes, contradicting the very first poem in the book. He later adds, “I did not pretend / to find God because I did not believe / this would persuade a girl to touch me.” Numerous poems in Boom Box describe that exact chain of events happening. Whether you take these negative statements at face value, then, defines how you read the entire book.
“Not everything / we read is telling that kind of truth,” Huey writes. In Boom Box, he certainly tells a kind of truth, whether it’s the literal, factual kind or not. The truth he offers is the soul of a moment: one frustrated person, one frustrating place, and a love affair with pop culture.
Amorak Huey has written five poetry collections (and co-written one more). His latest, Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy, came out in 2021.
Isaac Fox is a student at Lebanon Valley College, where he majors in English and creative writing. When he’s not reading or writing something assigned, he’s probably reading or writing something unassigned. His work has previously appeared in Bending Genres, Tiny Molecules, and Fifty-Word Stories, among other publications. You can find him on Twitter at @isaac_k_fox.