The Only One in the Room with White Socks by Michael Northen

In a time when—thanks, in part, to social media—it often feels that style is all, it is a pleasant shock to encounter a sincerity and truth-telling as deep and generous as Mike Northen’s. In The Only One in the Room with White Socks, Mike gifts us his lived experience, hard-won wisdom, along with his keen eye and profound feeling for the objects of the past, the lives of those who’ve gone before us and how they intertwine with our present. Working class poems, poems that tackle Northen’s long experience as a disability activist, this book hums with the complexity of living in time. “Droplets shining on the leaves/are not grace,” Northen tells us, “but dew condensing to remind us/that all is evaporation and return.” Yet the magic of this book is that it compels us to stop and revel in the half-seen details—the barn of an abandoned South Dakota farm, the hum of conversation in a nursing home, a coffee shop, the process of fishing just to cast the line, and then return the fish to the shining water. This is a wise book, full of ordinary wonders that do not appear in Northen’s telling of them ordinary at all.

–Sheila Black

What makes the poems in Michael Northen’s The Only One in the Room with White Socksso engaging is how his mind and heart move. Whether the poems begin with family, in a pub, in a café, or in nature, they often find their way via striking metaphor to probing questions or poignant commentary about the state of the world, mortality, and the nature of God. Along the way, Northen takes on a variety of poetic forms, pays tribute to the unsung and underappreciated, and wonders or worries about what life would be like if we lost our mental abilities (particularly language) should aging return our minds to the tabula rasa we had at birth. Then there’s the question of whether the world will remember us. In “March 21,” the poet remarks, “To be human means to be forgotten, / the way the soil will soon forget / the new life it cradles this year.” Yet the final poem argues otherwise. There, the poet imagines descendants picnicking among historic graves: “Great-grandchildren will ask / whose names are on the plaque / and the parents will reply / “Once upon a time …” which ingeniously circles us back to the family narratives that open this stellar collection.

–Daniel Simpson