Bob Sykora is intrigued by love affairs gone bad. Some are individual, including his own devastating breakup––one that leaves him waiting, in the book’s first poem, for “the crushing infinite/nothing to hug me to death. I’m sorry/if I sound morose but I can’t seem/to put my life back in order.” Others are broken engagements with dreams of an ideal human society, the American utopias he investigates while “…looking/for structure in the fringes/of history books.” Within these communities, Sykora ferrets out the doctrines and desires that make them tick, and which finally doom them. Utopians in Love is a fascinating journey in possibilities, as the poet ponders how to move forward by examining the past.
Sykora has researched the Transcendentalists at Brook Farm and Fruitlands, the religiously inspired Shakers, and the free-loving citizens of Oneida, as well as lesser-known utopian experiments, such as the Texas community inspired by a French novel (written by someone who’d never set foot in the States). The book braids poems springing from his investigations with those narrating the aftermath of personal loss. Sykora’s formal dexterity shapes sonnets, sestinas, abecedarians, prose poems, and free verse––often incorporating found texts gleaned from histories, diaries, and letters. In these poems, as well as through the book’s structure, Sykora successfully juxtaposes voices from the past with his 21st century sensibilities, creating a dual vision of passion and disappointment.
In the prose poem “Brook Farm, 1841-1846” Sykora notes that a project run by “Boston elites” ignored “all the bodies they were building on and leaving behind.” Rather than support political action, these utopians assumed their “big fix” would end slavery and grant women their rights. “Like me,” Sykora writes, “they believed you had to close your eyes to imagine something new.” During a visit to Brook Farm, as the poet fancies his “California knees/chattering/… /clutching my brother for warmth upstairs in the Hive” and “me and Hawthorn cranky over manure/ caught in our nails, matted in our hair.” Crafting a sonnet from Hawthorn’s notebooks, and a poem from a lovelorn Marianne Dwight’s letters––“Maybe, in full harmony there won’t be/ marriage”––Sykora creates a conversation between language uttered 185 years ago and his own disquiet. When he ends the sonnet “From the Journals of Nathaniel Hawthorne at Brook Farm” with “I can hardly remember who is president,” a contemporary reader is jarred by the impossibility of doing so today.
Attitudes toward marriage and sex engross Sykora as he examines life in two other communities–– the Shakers and the Oneida colony in New York. A celibate Sykora visits a Shaker village and compares his ex-lover’s “feet beating time/ in the pavement as [he] walked away” to a “beat the Shakers may/have danced to in prayer.” Sykora’s past melds with the present as he imagines “Sinking into myself, I want to shrink,/hide snug in Mother Ann’s rocker, fall asleep/until the Shakers return, and join me moaning/in prayer….” And though Shakers and Oneidans agree “no one should be exclusively attached to another person,” John Noyes, founder of the Oneida colony, preferred free love, or “complex marriage,” to being love-free. “Of course, he came to this practice after a woman he loved married another man,” Sykora writes; he continues, “Like me, even their wildest dreams were still informed by old pain.” The problem of building a utopia, Sykora discovers, parallels the arc lovers endure, cycling from infatuation to struggle with the thorniness of human nature.
The book’s penultimate poem, “Various Other Utopias,” begins with the irritation of online job applications that “…require you to fill in tiny boxes/with the exact same information you included/on the pdf resumé you already submitted,” before yearning for a place where “no one wonders/if they are loved.” In taking an axe to the frozen sea within him, Sykora imagines smashing “an amethyst in there deep down I swear somewhere sparkling inside me,”
right there on the big long table in the middle of the silent floor of the library
the August sun lighting up that rock that purple sparkling
the crash startles all the patrons with their headphones in and the dog starts barking
under the table oh it would be out of me it would be out my body
and it would be glowing
Utopians in Love concludes with the poet attending a Shaker service in Maine, home to the sect’s living members––two who will, eventually, join their brothers and sisters under a single tombstone. Driving away, Sykora gathers some comfort from one utopia he’s studied:
Listen:
their song lingers out
the window, past the frozen,
perfect lake, past the animals’
blissful disinterest…
The songs don’t demolish
the tombstone but turn it
on its head…
…it announces
we’re still here, still afloat
by some grace, some specter
of possibility. Its small whisper
twisting into my ear, itching
under my skin as I drive on again
in silence.
Boston-based press Game Over Books publishes fiction and poetry; their website states, “We want to show people that a 40-page poetry collection about Gerard Way as a queer and trans icon has just as much value, and has just as much quality, as New York Times bestsellers, if not more.” Bob Sykora’s Utopians in Love is a brilliant argument for the necessity of literary inquiry in a world where gems may be found in astonishing places.