Levithan, David. The Realm of Possibility.

"This is not very good poetry," I think as I flip through the first couple pages in the library. I think I stand by that remark. Of course, my standards for very good poetry are pretty high. What it is, is middling-good poetry, and that's more than good enough, because it's not about good poetry. It's about stories, and the truth.

At a rough estimate, I think the truth is about 90% of good poetry. But without the other 10%, it's just prose with line breaks. A lot of this is prose with line breaks. And I'm fine with that, upon closer consideration.

Sixteen narrators, each with a poem or more than a poem in them. Students at the same high school. Each one gets a quarter-chapter, and their stories weave in and out, touching just at the edges, leaving a lot of blank space; so much is unsaid that it's a pleasant surprise when we get to return to some of the stories from the beginning, the loose ends that one can't help wondering about. It takes patience, flipping back through the pages to figure out who said what about whom in the earlier poems, to keep track of the entire cast--but I like a book that rewards patience.

The stories are uniformly uplifting, in such a way that it shades into being untrue. The unrequited triangle of love resolves itself, the impossible couples stay together, people reach across boundaries in strange and perfect friendships. Life isn't this good; but this is The Realm of Possibility, I suppose. Why not allow for some unlikely happiness?

I don't have a lot to say that the book can't say for itself, so:

The moments we both collect
by living our lives, together and alone.
Rearranged alphabets, dream-remnant wonder,
the seat of our love. I pretend
I don't see him kneeling there,
my own scotch-tape sweetheart.

Or, again:

Yes, he is dressed in darkness.
But my eyes are getting used to the dark.
I notice the tree of black ink he's drawn on his black bag.
There is a moment in math class when I knock
my pencil off my desk and we both bend
to get it. His hair does not smell of darkness.
There are flowers underneath the ground.

And maybe this isn't great poetry, but the collage of vignettes and empty spaces and loose ends works in a way that a novel couldn't work.

Levithan, David. The Realm of Possibility. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.