In Rules for Loving Right, Brian Baumgart practices misdirection in that understated way unique to the upper Midwest. Winter, Minnesota isn’t the name of an actual small town but it could be, and the speaker of these poems could be from there, where cold makes everything clearer than we really want it to be. But as blunt as these poems are about death and love and the body, they’re also blunt about the self—messy and afraid and snotty and made up of laughable parts. There’s mockery here, of others and of the self, but it’s not aggressive, just honest. And just when we think we know something, we learn, along with the speaker, how little we know. “If there’s one thing I’ve found, it’s that/it’s not cool for a man to love/cats.” Yeah, right. Or is the fear here really that “it’s not cool for a man to love”? In these poems, we get a mother’s love in the stitches she makes to reconnect her child’s skin after childhood accidents and a father’s love in the way he fears while his boy is ice-skating. Love is freezing and burning, it’s aging and animal. Though these poems sometimes offer snarky one-liners, a hand to pull you up off the ice, in the end they want you to feel it all, the sharp edges of living, the ones that hurt you enough to make sure you’re awake.
—Katherine Riegel
Sweet Publications, 2017
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