Reviewed by: Taylor Mroz

In his radiant collection of prose-poems, Degrees of Romance, Peter Krumbach creates a playground for imagination in a neighborhood near reality. In his own words, Krumbach writes with the intention to “follow the logic of the unconscious,” and perfectly captures the absurdity and playful profundity of a dream. With sharp wit and dry humor, he invents surreal situations—a man finding Tchaikovsky under the bed, a divorcing couple slowly turning to wood, a newborn baby running away from the hospital—and uses them to deliver touching meditations on themes such as secrecy, stagnation, and parenthood. The poems wind through wandering paths of the mind, creating a distance from reality which is introduced early on in “Nightshift in Produce”: 

Big Sal tells me again how he loathes not only the way I stack, but the way I shelve. His words have a rhythm. They become a 5-mile-long train. I nod in triple time, then cut myself adrift, entering a space with no verbs, a field where the past, present and future exist at once. … I need to tell Big Sal that my soul is out back, playing chess against the loading dock crew, that his soul is marked down, bottom shelf, aisle 8. 
(5)

The disconnect between the speaker’s thoughts and physical existence is typical of the entire collection and how it moves away from corporeality in order to reach a plane of poetic enlightenment. The body is anchored to one place—in this case, the grocery store—but the mind slips away from the linear logic of reality, looping around to a state of wonder. The reader is urged to consider the absurdities of desire, connection, and loss, and invited to find meaning within them.

Krumbach employs accessible language that is craftily tilted on its head to form compressed bursts of imagination, which are easy to digest and latch onto because of their brevity. Through use of justified text, the poems are mostly square, framed by the page like vivid scenes painted on a museum wall. These scenes, full of bizarre premises, mainly occur in mundane, everyday locations —in a kitchen, on a park bench, on a highway—but their unique scenarios set a playful tone that can be peeled back to reveal layers of deep sincerity. In “Fugitive,” Krumbach weaves a tale of a runaway baby who flees the hospital to go “running with the bulls” in Pamplona, take a “selfie with pope Francis in the Vatican Gardens,” and launch a memoir from Simon & Schuster (8). The poem’s opening lines set a grim tone, initially implying a neonatal death by describing the infant as “lost” and “gone.” This seriousness is then subverted as the poem’s true meaning is revealed, and humor takes over with the imagery of a baby driving a getaway car or running laps in the womb. Ultimately, though subtly, the poem circles back to the themes of loss—not from death, but from being left behind. The parents are forced to wrestle with both the joy of their baby’s adventures and the sting of the baby’s absence, and the reader is confronted with the bittersweet realities of watching a child grow up.

Although Degrees of Romance refuses to give easy answers about these big ideas, it embraces absurdity as one way to cope with them. In “Explaining Marriage to an Alien,” which aptly describes its own premise, the paradoxical nature of human relationships is explored through dialogue:

Does it cause happiness? Yes, a great joy. A heat that grows homicidal. Don’t most of you divorce? We do. And those who don’t? They’ve thought of it. So, you marry why? Love. The hand of a hundred fingers. (7)

Zooming out to an alien’s perspective allows for an objective consideration of how many human behaviors don’t seem to make sense. Every relationship ends, whether through separation or death, yet we love anyway. We act on emotion, defy logic for spontaneity, hold superstitions, procrastinate to our detriment, and dream for mysterious reasons. The best way to address these contradictions is through art, and the human element of the surreal situations Krumbach conjures is the thread that ties the collection together. Whether a poem is from the mind of a bird, or God, or a well-mannered bear, it spins the yarn of fundamental human experience out of seemingly unrelatable fibers.

Among its other delicate takeaways, Degrees of Romance teaches us to pay attention to the world around and inside of us and see it in new ways. It is part instruction manual, part insightful acid trip, part confusing dream, and part shout into the void. It first makes us comfortable, offers a cup of humor and suggests we put our feet up, then pulls out the rug from under us to reveal the aching vulnerability of the human condition. As its layers unfold, the book itself becomes “a span which renders truths we’ve sensed but deemed invisible visible,” and, much like with dreams, its lessons are whatever we make of them.

Cited: Peter Krumbach, “10 Questions for Peter Krumbach,” interview by Edward Clifford, The Massachusetts Review, vol. 61 (Spring 2020), www.massreview.org/node/8935. 

TAYLOR MROZ is pursuing creative writing at WMU and plans to work in the publishing industry. Her work has been selected for The Laureate and she currently lives in Kalamazoo.