Part of Review of "A Broken Escalator Still Isn't The Stairs"

Out of the 29 poems, 7 of them involve missing.  These poems are crucial to the collection as a whole but also fit cohesively together when separated out from the chapbook.  These poems begin, “to say on is missing…” (3, 8, 13, 18, 22, 26, 29).  By combining the idea of missing with a person (or the speaker) there is a created tone of absence.  This theme carries throughout the collection as a whole.  There is a missing woman.  There is not seeing.  There are missing cities.  There is the misplaced.  These themes make these short poems resound with a voice full of confusion and discontent.  The broken and lost theme of these poems brings the reader desire to solve a kind of mystery of the given discontent.  However, is comfort found?  Is the puzzle solved?  This could be possible by the briefest poems in the collection that involve nature.  These petite poems sit in a place of calm realism.  Combine all of these pieces and the reader finds comfort in not knowing.  These themes do not create a bad collection.  They create a thought provoking solidity in the unknown and feel for the absurdist world (and poetry world).  Finally, these missing poems create, in themselves, an absence that the reader can see blankness, simple abolition of these poems or the subject of these poems.  All of these possibilities lend themselves to the fine-tuned ambiguity by Carlise.