On Past Lives by V. Joshua Adams

by Tyler Truman Julian

V. Joshua Adams’ debut full-length collection, Past Lives, is an intellectual tour de force that rejects singular poetic categorization. Adams masters the precision of imagery that anchors the reader in familiar emotions and symbolic motifs, even as his speaker enters abstract personal recollections and experiences. The result is a blurring between the sublime and the ordinary. As a whole, the collection’s blended slice-of-life narrative and philosophy echoes great Modernists like T.S. Elliot and Gertrude Stein, while its sensuality and creative word choice moves the poetry beyond Modernism into the same realm as writers like John Ashberry and Janaka Stucky. Past Lives is for true poetry lovers: those who wish to be challenged and who revel in the complex world shaped by words on a page.

Past Lives traces a life divided into three stages—a first, a second, and a third—and follows a narrative shaped by the progression of aging, exploring its inevitability and the fears attached to it. The collection confronts the inevitability of time’s passage and the fear that can come with it. Rather than offering a simple answer to how one should age well, it instead urges readers to find joy and presence in the current moment, a clear call to revel in the now. “Were we inside of a novel, and, if so, / was I a character or merely the narrator?” the speaker asks in “Dora,” the first poem in the last section of the book. “Dora” embraces a sensuality and, even, eroticism that points toward the answer, Don’t observe; be a character in the novel of your life. This dynamic is present from the beginning of Past Lives and serves as a thread that pulls the reader through the energetic and challenging collection. In “Circles,” the collection’s opening poem, the speaker-character is lost, unable to be their own person amid the demands of daily life, and “That’s when you found me, staring at the stopped clock,” the speaker reports, then continues,

            and showed me the way out: a ritual
            where we barred the door, turned up the halogen lamps,
            and stared at each other until we decided
            which swimsuits most flattered our blanched bodies,
            high cut one pieces or string bikinis.

Adams’ collection encourages us to find our community and live each day with intention, a theme that connects the collection’s more abstract, personal moments, grounding its intellectual reflections in ordinary, human experience. This dichotomy runs as an undercurrent throughout Past Lives and appears strikingly in individual poems as well, such as in “The Middle,” which opens in the abstract before anchoring itself in the mundane:

            Of course, a lot of us have never had it so good.
            The average end is farther away from the middle
            than ever before. Years of slower diminishing stretch out ahead.
            There will be time to solve our problems,
            time to refreeze the sea ice, regrow hair, reinflate cheeks.
            There will be time to read Tolstoy and Proust,
            to take up painting and get serious about things
            like wine. And if not, well, why not just do what the man says,
            and eat and drink and live each day deep as your last?
            Nobody does that, though, especially people.

Though abstract snapshots, these poems emphasize that one is able to live life deeply simply by living life and refusing to be a narrator. This is especially embodied in “Routine”:

            Morning, midsummer. Asphalt exhales
            a white coat, skirt, and thick shoes
            dappled red.
                            Nights, she’s a nurse;
           days, she sleeps on an overstuffed couch.
           Foxhunt prints stand guard.
           High in the attic, a boy reads the Odyssey.
           Souls drink blood from troughs
           and speak clouds of ink mist. Embracers tumble.
           Across the river in the sick city
           people sicken and die. Down by the pool
           the sun shines, and the gardeners break for lunch.

The various people in “Routine” exercise free will and choose how to spend their time—decorating with vintage pictures, reading alone or taking lunch. “People sicken and die” and death is inevitable, but until it arrives everyone has the agency to decide how they live, even in small, often overlooked ways.

V. Joshua Adams’ Past Lives is a quiet call to action to live this life. While this message echoes across the collection, each poem stands on its own—distinct and thought-provoking—inviting readers to delight in the act of reading poetry and the human connection that comes with it. There is beauty to be found in the intellectual challenge of Past Lives, and those who read it will not be disappointed. With this collection, Adams confirms for us that engaging with poetry is one way to live each day and revel in the now.

In case you missed it—here is Adams’ poem from The Shore:
Problem of Fiction