Dispatch from Every Second Guess, Megan Gannon's fourth work, is a moving memoir in verse about midlife marriage and parenting in an "age of senseless storylines."
The book cycles through landmarks from the author's life, including transracial adoption, divorce, finding love again, and blending families. But "personal and political begin and end// the same way," Gannon (Cumberland) notes, and news of police and vigilante murders make her fear for her Black son's future. He's not even protected at a hotel pool, where an angry mother manhandles him for stumbling into her blonde daughter; when Gannon confronts the woman, she insists it was a misunderstanding.
All of the poems include the word "Dispatch" in the title. Most are in unrhymed couplets, sometimes ending with a single envoi-like line. A clever in-joke: in this free-verse work, the only end rhymes are to be found in "Dispatch from Advanced Poetry." More often, the poems are laced with alliteration or enhanced by repetition, such as "Because..." anaphora and "safe" closing each stanza of a ghazal. The collection also contains lines borrowed from Mary Oliver and one adapted from Robert Frost.
Gannon interrogates everyday metaphors (e.g., a trapped bird) and fairy tales--if her husband's daughter is the princess, is she the wicked stepmother? Given life's uncertainty and fragility, she seems to suggest, one must cling all the more to loved ones during turbulent times. A poem pondering marriage commemorates "the always-lost-but-somehow-still-lasting-now"--all experience, especially happiness, is fleeting, but Gannon's poetry is adept at capturing it. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck