Heartworm by Adam Scheffler Review by Angelo Mao

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Heartworm by Adam Scheffler

Review by Angelo Mao

Publisher: Moon City Press

Publication Date: February 6, 2023

ISBN: 0913785601

Pages: 70

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The titular object of Heartworm is a dog parasite that resides for years in the heart and feeds on surrounding flesh. Literal heartworms barely figure in Heartworm, but the parasite is an apt metaphor for the book’s central struggle. Scheffler’s first book is called A Dog’s Life, and if a first book establishes poetic voice and persona, then Heartworm can be understood as an exploration of the underlying anxieties troubling that persona. Scheffler’s second collection engages in the question of how to praise and love a world in spite of the anxiety it elicits—anxiety that, like the book’s titular object, gnaws at the heart of who we are.

Scheffler’s voice in Heartworm is built on wit, humor, and an easy loquaciousness; there is something canine in the poems’ verbal energy, their attention to the mundane, and their seeming absurdity. “Advice From a Dog,” for example, starts memorably with a one-line command: “Piss expressively.” Another poem, “Object d’Art,” disguises a declaration of love in a playful meditation on the shapeliness of the speaker’s behind. “Dear Florida” mixes witty banter with indignation at the state’s outsized role in contemporary American politics: “Your bird-lined bridges are lovely, I can’t tell you enough. / But Trump and Bush, really, Florida?”

The light tone often masks more somber subjects. The poem “To My Two Legs” begins as an ode to the speaker’s two legs, “humble hairy wings” that have carried him “two and a half times round the Earth, / to where I sit here / with you folded up beneath / me[.]” About a third through, the poem embarks on a meditation on the fragile connection between our sense of self and the bodies we inhabit:

…………I want to tell you your

…………faith in incremental progress

…………is breathtaking—whatever

…………state you are in, stop or go,

…………you are in it utterly,

…………as when I lie down at night and you

…………vanish, connected to me

…………by only the thinnest thread,

…………the silk leash of my spine.

Here, the chill of disembodiment is leavened by humor and the idiosyncratic subject matter. Other poems appear more direct in their confrontation of difficult topics. There is a stretch of poems in the middle of Heartworm whose titles read like a roll call of contemporary crises: “Climate Change,” “School Shooting,” “The Dead,” “45,” and “Breaking News.” But even in these poems, the subject is approached at a slant. “School Shooting,” for instance, is a one-stanza description of the chalked silhouettes of victims’ bodies. Here, as if eclipsed by the enormity of the subject matter, Scheffler’s speaker dials down his typical verbal energy, and the body of the poem, written in short lines, is restricted to an elegant elaboration of a single image:

…………After today’s rain,

…………all that’s left

…………of the planets’

…………green and pink

…………they’d chalked

…………on the sidewalk,

…………and their slim figures

…………outlined by the police […] 

Elsewhere, the humor and light tone of Scheffler’s speaker can ensnare as much as it can disarm. In “Ode to Zamboni Machines,” Scheffler draws us into a claustrophobic poem that flirts with nihilism, using the annihilative function of Zamboni machines for its central metaphor (“There was a whole other section to the poem / here that I deleted, or Zambonied over”). The two-paged poem occupies a single stanza and one inexorable sentence; the effect is of being trapped in the disquiet of a mind:

…………[…] I wish I could be more like snails, the shining

…………Zambonis of the soil, spinning mucousy, abalone

…………roads behind them before they’re murdered

…………by persnickety gardeners who have a deep

…………knowledge of both flowers and poison, but yet

…………also have a patience I do not, in my constant

…………rushing and worrying and ugly conversational

…………blundering, that is not unlike the deep, quiet

…………patience that Frank Zamboni dreamed of after

…………his family left overheated Vespa-smoggy Italy

…………for overheated freeway-smoggy Los Angeles […]

The sense of Sisyphean activity is accentuated through the poem’s repetition of the name “Zamboni,” whose semantic blankness in English eerily echoes the emptiness of postmortem existence. At the same time, the name provides a zany energy that plugs Scheffler’s voice into his subject and provides a necessary foil to poem’s darker concerns.

In addition to free verse poems like “Ode to Zamboni Machines,” Heartworm contains poems formally organized by anaphora. “Autocomplete Questions” is composed of line-length questions completed, presumably, by an internet search engine:

…………Why do corpses smell sweet

…………Why does night time smell different

…………What are clocks based on

…………What is a pervert ed spirit

…………Why pray at 3 a.m.

…………Do the dead know what time it is

Here, by eschewing enjambment, Scheffler lets each line become a complete unit that repeats cyclically, like days on a calendar or seasons in a year. Although the image choices retain a keen sense of the absurd, the energetic asides and jokes that characterize the free verse poems are missing. The “quietness” of the reduced voicing and the stable rhythm of anaphora contrast with the energetic free verse poems to elicit a sense of reprieve.

Scheffler combines the aleatory calm of his anaphoric poems with the zest of his free verse poems in the poignant “Old Friends Home for Retired Racehorses.” This poem recounts the speaker’s visit to a farm for rescued racehorses that, no longer fit for racing, have been sold for slaughter:

…………I went to the farm of retired racehorses,

…………and was glad I had come, loving how

…………I’m Charismatic leads blind and biting

…………Rapid Redux to feed, how violent Amazombie

…………is given two goats like two wives to

…………shush and calm him, to precede

…………like an honor guard as he stops from the

…………truck, how Silver Charm—their most

…………famous horse—…

The inexorable forward movement in poems like “Ode to Zamboni Machines” is encapsulated by the racehorses, which are bred solely to run. Here, they have been relieved of their burden of motion and, unexpectedly, given a reprieve from death. Scheffler formally enacts the grace of this reprieve by incorporating the racehorses’ names into the poem’s text. Whereas “Zamboni” unnerved through its semantic blankness, the surprise and strangeness of racehorse names—“I’m Charismatic,” “Rapid Redux,” “Amazombie”—create a sense of wonderment.

The final poem in Heartworm, “Insects in the Floodlights,” carries Scheffler’s effort to balance praise with pessimism to the end. After marveling at the spectacle of insects crowding towards floodlights at night (“their / alien frenzy, their aerial orgy, / that burns them up one after / another”), the speaker asks: “How could we not / love their teeming / world without us?” The question can be read as a cheeky gesture affirming human worth: without humans, how will it be possible for the world to be loved and praised? But the same question can be read as a coolly misanthropic remark: who wouldn’t love a world “teeming” with nature that is absent of humans? A different poet might end with a definite note of grace or nihilism, but Scheffler is too committed to poetic truth to let us off so easily. Like the cover image of Heartworm—a painting based on one of NASA’s photographs of the sun—these last few lines encapsulates Scheffler’s view of the human condition: bright, warm, and suspended in the friendless eternity of space.

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Adam Scheffler grew up in California, received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his PhD in English from Harvard. His first book of poems—A Dog’s Life—won the 2016 Jacar Press book contest, and his second poetry book—Heartworm—won the 2021 Moon City Press book contest. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Narrative, The Yale Review, Verse Daily, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and many other venues. He’s currently working on a book of literary criticism about the poet James Wright and he teaches in the Harvard College Writing Program.

Angelo Mao is a regulatory scientist and writer. He is the author of Abattoir, which won the Burnside Review Press Book Award. His poems have been published by journals including Poetry Magazine, The Georgia Review, The Drift, and Annulet. His prose about poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He also edits DIALOGIST, an online poetry journal.

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15 November 2023