I struggle to understand the system by which one can “rate” a collection of poems, but like always, I want to record my experience with this book, so I can remember said experience two years down the road. :) Dispatch was gifted to me by the Julep Town Collective, a wonderful community of readers that I am hoping to join in discussion in 2021. While I am months behind their group read of this collection, I’d like to “review” it by belatedly answering JTC’s discussion questions:

Question 1: Share your favorite poem from this book. Why did this particular poem stand out to you?

My favorite poem in this book was “The Cure for What Ails You”, on page 54. I loved the generational reversals in this poem, as the narrator becomes a skeptic, student, and ultimately a peddler of the “golden bullet remedies” so many of our mothers share. On a broader level, this poem encapsulates everything I loved most in Dispatch: Cameron Awkward-Rich’s humor, vision (and revision), physicality, and fearlessness when asking troubling questions about the world we live in.

Some of his greatest questions are raised in “The Cure for What Ails You”, and many echo throughout the book: What does it mean to live in a world that is ending, and failing so many who are trying to hold onto it? What does it mean to live in a body that is weaponized by society, and constructed to become one of “only two” genders? How do these societal constructs of gender become cages? How could the end of this world dismantle those (amongst other) cages?

Question 2: What do you think the author’s purpose was in writing this book? What do you think he was trying to get across?

I’m not sure if this was his only purpose, but personally, I think Awkward-Rich’s work led me to ask the questions above. I think of these as guided questions that carry readers to the book’s final invitation: to think about the end of our world. (As many people are learning, this is another definition of abolition.) This book’s embrace of death, troubling of elegy, and refusal to ask dying people to “walk again among those/who could not bear/the sight of you” is part of the invitation (which I see as the main purpose.)

Other thoughts on purpose: In my understanding, Awkward-Rich writes these poems not to be depressing, but to encourage readers to imagine something better after “death.” Through these poems, he’s letting us know that we have the choice to “repair a world or build/a new one.” I think he’s asking to imagine this new world, which would come through the death of our existing systems, and then build this new world in whatever intimate and public ways we can. This world is one where marginalized genders could thrive: “the world is ending...& I can’t bear knowing there’s a door/& behind the door a country/that loves my sisters, that tends/their gorgeous lives.”

Question 3: Would you recommend this book to someone else?
While I would recommend certain poems to anyone, I would recommend the entire book to poets and/or those reading with a group. These poems stand on their own two feet, but they are also sequential in a manner that few poetry collections can pull off. I think poets would enjoy the craft of this, and I think a community of readers would enjoy unpacking the sequences together.

Question 4: Do you have any other thoughts that you would like to share?
Just like these poems return to each other, I will look forward to returning to this book in the future.