Tell me which Twilight Zone episode you remember best, and I can tell you whether or not you’ll enjoy Sommer Browning’s 2022 poetry book, Good Actors. Pardon the spoiler alert, but the answer is a resounding “yes.” Browning’s introductory, one-sentence page “opens to reveal” for us an entryway, much like the open-curtain beginning of a theatrical production, in which the next 90-plus pages of poems are players themselves, putting on a sometimes poignant, always playful performance.
Homage is paid to such female figures as Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, Carol Burnett, and Bea Arthur. Likewise to the poet’s mother who, she writes, “is horrified that the children’s cartoon character Caillou is bald,” considers similarities between traffic cones and penises, and, [o]ne night in the 1970s, in the Mojave Desert … ceases to feel apart from the world.” Add to that peculiar and oddly-gratifying description that the poet’s mother pays Browning and her sister “$40 each to not have birthday parties” and that her true soulmate is her dog, named Six. Among other such seemingly random and entirely eccentric declaratives in the same poem, Browning touches gently on our sentimentality, writing: “I listen to my mother tell my child a story as if I were my own daughter.”
Elsewhere, in “To Drunk to Fuck,” one wonders whether the poem itself was written under the influence, or purposely made to seem so—either way, “only drunk enogh to type,” addressing the poet “Bukowsku,” the speaker declares “I will take off m y dresss / And then will I ven want to typeanymore / Provalbly not / Too tired’ [. . .] But you bukowski / The lust’ / But you rimabaud’ / The bukowski’”
Arranged in between poems about eating wings alone in an Asian fusion restaurant during the Super Bowl, “acting naturally” as one converses with The Void, analysis of “a hundred things to say about” the poet’s fascination in hearing Aram Saroyan read his poetry at Poet’s House in NYC some sixteen-odd years ago, composition of a “memoir in one-liners,” and a romp of an LSD-infused, golden-showered, puke-inducing essay on how “Sex Is Like Porn in Real Life”—woven nonchalantly throughout with what one can only imagine is expressed with deadpan demeanor of a “good actor” in this “good script” of a film/oral history/experiential performance piece—is a lovely “running joke” which Browning has rather brilliantly crafted—and undoubtedly runs with:. “If you tell me which Twilight Zone episode you remember / best, I can tell you what your problem is.” Cue nostalgic black-and-white 1950s-60s film-noir sci-fi recollection of:
Little People. Astronaut on foreign planet finds colony of
tiny people. Treated like a god. Goes maniacal. Stomps on
LP. Giant Astros arrive and stomp on him.
and,
The one in the diner with the people stranded and turning on one another. The waiter has three eyes.
or,
The one with the man on trial who is innocent and relives
every day and then screams “look in the oven!” at the
prosecutor who finds out too late the man was right after
he sees there’s a turkey in there like he promised.
or,
The one where Charles Bronson eats fried chicken out of
a can in a post-apocalyptic world
The speaker of Good Actors, like a hypnotic junked-out-Looney-Tune- Volkswagen- Van-habitating-pseudo-psychiatrist, arrives at precisely worded descriptions of the various Twilight Zone-viewers’ “problems.”
Browning’s marvelously creative (and simply downright fun!) poetry collection swirls with the stuff of dreams, the biochemical particulars of sexuality and lust, lists of pharmaceutical concoctions, names of people the poet has “Gone to the Movies With,” and a “Dramatis Personae” consisting of only four players: her mother, sister, daughter, and father. Such literary and artistic choices place slightly longer works—which tend to be narrative in nature and confessional in style, snugly alongside among smaller, focused, “list” poems—and as such, one could mistakenly (dis)regard the latter as inconsequential, as unnecessary marginalia. Such assessment would be most unfortunate, as Browning’s collection—taken as a whole, spending quality time with and truly savoring the slice-of-life, experimental-yet-rooted-firmly-in-the-everyday, small poetic/cinematic masterpiece—takes bold risks and achieves something celebratory and impressive.
In divvying up the seemingly simple right alongside the more drawn-out, expository, character-driven poetics of an actor in a film called a book of poetry, simultaneously writing said script and living/acting out the poems, Browning breathes life anew through the spectacular theatrical art of words arranged lovingly on pages.
Writes Browning in her poem, “The First Number Will Be a Blues”: “Before we’re born, my mother tells us, / We watch movies of every life we could be born into. Then we choose.” Of the many dozens and dozens (likely hundreds) of poetry collections throughout the past year I have read and enjoyed—and in the process gotten to know the names and unique creative insights of an equal number of new-to-me poets—I would have to say, absent any hyperbole, Browning’s Good Actors is, quite honestly and most refreshingly, my favorite choice of all I read in 2022.
The overall impression gleaned from this collection is—to borrow the words written in her poem “Anxiety”—something akin to having “put a stick of dynamite up [one’s] ass, / Lit it, and jumped into the crowd.” Explosive? Most certainly. But in a terribly pleasantly-surprising manner.
Good Actors, by Summer Browning. Birds, LLC, March 2022. 100 pages. $18.00, paper.
Jonah Meyer is a poet, writer, and editor based in North Carolina. He serves as poetry editor for Mud Season Review, assistant poetry editor with Random Sample Review, copy editor for Under the Gum Tree, poetry reader for Okay Donkey, and staff writer with The US Review of Books. Jonah’s poetry and other creative work has been published widely, both in print and online.
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