Memory, too, serves as a recurrent theme. Stuart’s story in particular provides a tragic undercurrent to the collection: his search for identity takes increasingly darker turns, heading eventually to self-mutilation and then suicide.
By experiencing comic books, Jackson explores darker themes of racism, death, and the strangling ordinariness of small-time life. They read comics together and grow up together-and that’s how Jackson’s poems transcend mere fanboy pap. Many of the poems feature Jackson and his friend, Stuart. “We imagine the feel of soft air like Kansas clouds in fall./But Jim claims seeing his own dick/inside her is a sight/he can’t afford to pass up.” “Jim says Invisible Woman,” Jackson writes. Sexual awakening mixes in as part of their “diet of Snickers, comics, and porn.” They talk about which superheroine they’d like to screw. As the boys get older, they adopt superhero names and chat with girls online while wishing they had real girls to talk to instead. Other poems capture the experience of reading comics, “the power to inhabit a world a page removed from our own.” For young kids, it’s about escape and adventure and wish fulfillment. Mary Jane Parker makes her husband, Peter, have sex with her while wearing his Spider-Man costume “because she likes to pretend Spider-Man is her other lover.” Lois Lane hopes Clark Kent, just once in the quiet of their kitchen over dinner, will bleed a little when he pretends to cut himself because she’s desperate for a glimpse of him as a non-super human.
An old washed-up Juggernaut, riding out his retirement years, uses his super-strength to take on all-comers in arm-wrestling tournaments. Some of the poems capture what “real life” must be like for superhumans and the people around them. It’s sophisticated, witty, and thought-provoking-and it doesn’t require a fanboy’s sensibilities or background to appreciate. Like all of today’s best comic books, Missing You, Metropolis has a lot more going on in it than just action heroes. Gary Jackson’s Missing You, Metropolis (Graywolf Press, 2010) caught my eye because it was about comic books. I’ve looked up names I’ve heard once upon a time and barely remembered. I’ve browsed random collections at the bookstore. I’ve taken recommendations from friends and classmates. I’m trying to figure this shit out, trying to figure out what I am and what I’m not by reading lots of stuff by poets who are. Ostensibly, I’m a poet-but only because I’m taking a graduate-level poetry-writing workshop. I’m ferociously cramming contemporary poetry into my head this semester in an attempt to force-feed my brain.
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