reviewed on September 25, 2024

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Follow-up to his 2018 Fludde, itself a darkly lined portrait of the resigned nostalgia and banal splendors of what passes as “western civilization,” Peter Mishler’s superb Children in Tactical Gear catalogs, in the poet’s characteristic manic allegories, the abuses and abasements of life under monopoly capital. 

 

Mishler’s poems are breathless, panic-inducing tours de farce, hysterical in their portrait of the rhetorical and material matrices that structure contemporary life, from PIN numbers and Yeti tumblers to Target and blockchain.  Like contemporary life, the poems would be surreal if they weren’t also so horrifying, evoking as they do a world given over to pervasive violence, ecological calamity, and to the seductive nothingness of the commodity.  In Children in Tactical Gear, Mishler evokes the lapsed potential of the species, contrasting, as in the book’s opening poem, “Woke Up at the Edge of Hasbro,” the miracle of its own existence with its present decadence:

 

In the bedpan,

watched the naming

of my parents,

 saw them led

beneath the vaulting of a manger,

charred and cold.

Who studied

the back blow,

sipped from

the birth-horn,

looked up toward

a ceiling

of access fobs

and entry wands,

a whole lifetime of them

sealed therein

in gelatin.

And had the two

not shrieked?

I might have offered

immortality.

 

As here, Children in Tactical Gear gestures to what might have been in order to indict what is, as the following poem undercuts a kind of cosmic “immortality” with the opening statement that “On Earth shall my sorrow be.”  The banal majesty of cornfields, for instance—to which the Kansas-based Mishler would be well attuned—matter in the world of these poems only insofar as they can be converted into chemical “sugars, / and thereby fuels, / and thereby plastics, / and thereby poisons, / and thereby weapons.”  Children matter only insofar as they can carry those weapons.

 

As much as the collection revels in its despair, it also evokes a cynical astonishment at the object world of monopoly capitalism, its incantatory catalogs gleaming darkly with materialist splendor; as if in a kind of cathexis, Mishler lavishes his attention on the things he loathes, among them Aeron chairs, scent plug-ins, Sutter Home wine, athleisure wear, and cans of Reddi-Wip.  Like Marx’s spinning table, Mishler’s commodities are alive with horror and fascination.  Mishler observes those commodities, moreover, with a keenness of attention that leads one to pleasurable recognitions, as when he describes

 

the handing out

of digital badges

for each of these virginal

radical empaths

and real swag too

through the US mail

those colorful polymer

charity bracelets

built with a tender give

for the gnawing.

 

Neither is Mishler’s indictment of the world-at-large lacking in humor; indeed, the collection is often hilarious in its bathos.  In “A List of His Flaws,” for example, Mishler itemizes himself with psychological shrewdness:

 

Single-headed.

 

Flowering inwardly.

 

Barely felt in the birth canal.

 

[…]

 

Herod in boyhood.

 

A Mishler poem is sui generis, but one recalls throughout Children in Tactical Gear the voice and wit of Dean Young, the associative cultural diagnostics of Heather Christle, and the surrealism of Brenda Shaughnessy, who picked the book for the 2023 Iowa Poetry Prize. 

 

The collection is a short one, but its high-energy breeziness gives it the shimmer and consumability of a commodity, a snack. 

 

Or, the collection is a delicious one. 

 

Or, like all properly self-loathing poets, Mishler is what he abhors.