Sundress Reads: Review of Whish

The more I read about time, the more I contemplate my relationship to it, and its fleeting nature, the more overwhelmed I get. I become so tangled up in my own bewilderment, I could never really imagine trying to tackle the subject of time head on in my writing. But what if you had the wisdom, unlike me, to let time’s chaotic nature liberate your writing, rather than frustrate it? That’s exactly what happens in Jackie Craven’s thrillingly original poetry collection Whish (Press 53, 2024). Rather than trying to get a grip on time, Craven embraces the contradiction and fragmentation of memory, allowing her to create poems that are funny, poignant, heartbreaking, disturbing, and always surreal.

Like the majority of the poems in Whish, “Management Has Hired Three New Seconds” is a small paragraph of prose poetry, wherein the title is actually part of the first line. “Management has hired three new seconds, but they mangle every task. One flutters through ceiling vents, one twiddles with the computer fans, one…jams the copy machine” (Craven 3). In response, “Management shrugs—adds a jiffy and a zeptohour. I slump at my desk and pretend the day is round” (Craven 3). The poem, apparently, is about “leap seconds.” The rotation of the Earth is actually often shorter than 24 hours, and the deficit builds up, so roughly every two years, three new seconds are added to the year. Craven writes, “These adjustments are imperfect and can cause technical mishaps and scheduling snafus” (65). The speaker here draws a funny comparison between convoluted, often bad management decisions and being at the mercy of time. Both are confusing, both cause headaches. Indeed, the day may as well be round. Why not?

This poem also includes Craven’s personification of time, another technique she employs throughout the book. Usually they are times of day or specific (but also vague) moments that eventually become characters, complete with their own arcs and esoteric, personal meanings to the narrator. On this, two stand out: “Half Past Yesterday” and “63:13.”

The former first appears in the poem “Half Past Yesterday Has Abandoned Me.” In this short prose poem, the narrator is left to “sulk in the rain-slicked plaza outside the computer repair shop and the delinquent hour doesn’t come…I slog through puddles, a statue learning to walk” (13). Craven seems to have a specific talent for evoking sadness and its many refractions. Here, the speaker has obviously been spurned by “the delinquent hour” (13). Given its peculiar name, maybe it represents the speaker’s inability to move on from the past, still using yesterday as a frame of reference.

We first meet 63:13 in “63:13 Shivers on the Marquee,” a prose poem in which a broken electric clock displays the time 63:13. The narrator poignantly asks “When they fix the clock, where will the broken hour go? / 63:13 blinks, plots a getaway.” 63:13’s meaning is even more elusive than Half Past Yesterday’s, but both reappear throughout Whish, hiding in a freezer, presumably killing a sister, their arcs eventually culminating and colliding in the fourth-to-last poem, Craven writes,

There’s something undeniably eerie and haunted about this poem, and that’s not just because of the presence of the ghost in it, either. If chronology, to quote Einstein (and the epigraph of Whish) is “only a stubbornly persistent illusion,” how then are we to conceive of our selves? Our past? Our griefs, our traumas? It could be a freeing idea, a joyous one even, but the tone of the poem strikes me as being resigned—which I find to be relatable and even poignant. Our illusory nature isn’t bad, and it isn’t good, it just…is. It’s a truth you can spend decades repeating to yourself; to have the wisdom and poetic skill to actually evoke its emotional truth is something few writers ever possess.

This almost hidden storyline is just a glimpse into a truly dazzling masterwork. Some of the best poems in Whish are the ones that break from the prose poetry format. In “Someone Should Do Something About The Clock At City Hall,” a clock breaking down unleashes dinosaurs on an urban landscape: “Soon megalodons will swim into the harbor / and swallow the paddleboats…Pterodactyls collide with flights / from Baltimore” (16). It’s a poem packed with chaotic juxtapositions and great lines. “My Misery Sleeps Through the Sunrise” is a perfect poem for our times in which “Glaciers weep, pathogens carouse, / and in Martha’s Vineyard, manatees / was ashore” (44). And then, in a series of poems throughout the book, there is a deeply unsettling story about a Human Clock, a character held against her will, her speech broken and her skin literally left out to dry. All this in only 60 pages. The only thing to do with a collection like Whish is to dive in with open arms and enjoy the submersion, even when it feels overwhelming, like drowning. Maybe I should do the same thing with time.

Whish is available from Press 53

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Joseph Norris graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in May of 2025. He has had short stories and poems published in Gauge magazine, and Emerson Green Mag and has won the Humans of the World Summer Poetry Prize. He lives in Berkeley, California with his girlfriend Macie and their cat, Dory, and is learning how to play the guitar and the banjolin.