I often lose faith in poetry. Reading and writing poems is usually the first thing I do when I wake up and the last thing I do before going to sleep, but I don’t always know why. I don’t understand much of what I read. Even less moves me or provides me with a unique glimpse into the mysteries of existence. This probably says more about me as a reader than it does about the poems I encounter every day.

I read widely, searching for something that I can’t quite name. Sometimes I find it, whatever “it” is, and I am reminded why I spend so much of the little free time I have on poetry.

Poetry that captures a real sense of joy is rare, especially if tinged with humor, and even more so while exposing something deep in the human psyche (or even soul, if you want to call it that), so I was pleased when I came across the ten pieces Only Poems published by Aimee Wai, a poet I had never heard of before, but one that I hope to find more work from in the future.

The first piece, “Unplucked,” feels like a dream, or maybe more like the hazy memory of a dream, one had years ago but almost forgotten. It is familiar and follows a dream logic that in its own way makes perfect sense, despite being surreal, and despite it being difficult to articulate why exactly it makes sense. I reread it multiple times. It feels like a love poem, especially when Wai writes, “I came to meet you anyways, lit up and empty handed,” but one in which the love ends up only being one-sided. How many of us have felt like love is showing up, “lit up,” but feeling like you have nothing to offer, and still hoping for something in return?

“You Asked Me What I Wanted,” despite its brevity, feels epic in its love of the world—the wanting for all things, the wanting of art, the wanting to “make time for everything and do nothing with it.” I thought of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” particularly his musings about the grass, “the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.” Wai concludes with “I’m hungrier than a bird that swallowed the big blue sky.” That is a hunger, a love of the world and of life so enormous that its ache can barely be put into words, because we know it can never be satisfied, but Wai found a way to capture it for us, to provide us with an image we can refer to when we are bursting with a desire to immerse ourselves fully in a universe so enormous we know, and we lament, that we can only experience a tiny bit of it in a lifetime.

Throughout Wai’s work we are asked to suspend disbelief as the poems make unexpected leaps into the fantastical, but it leaves one feeling, once looking up from the page (or the screen), that we should be suspending disbelief all the time. These little poems might be full of absurdities, but so is living, and perhaps that’s what can make life, if seen from a certain perspective, amazing.

Wai weaves humor into more serious topics with lines like, “My parents raised me tough and  /  or unable to ask for help,” in “Cedar Fever,” and the opening to “When Your Entire Year is One Big Freudian Slip of the Real You,” which is not only a title that immediately hooks a reader, but which also opens with, “Oops there I go again being myself. Silly me, showing my intentions,” a beginning that is so casual but which opens up so many possibilities that you have no choice but to laugh and read on. More (maybe all?) poems should start with the word “oops.”

These poems are short and feel somehow both polished and unpolished (in a good way) simultaneously—like gems dug up still covered with a bit of dirt that makes the glistening parts shine even brighter by contrast.

In Only Poems’ accompanying interview, Wai provides us with a prompt, which in part asks, “Can you describe yourself without stating what you are?” It’s a great question—and one that she answers successfully, in many interesting ways, throughout each of the ten excellent poems shared. Reading through just a few of the pieces gives one an impression that they are getting to know a writer with a unique, inviting, and idiosyncratic vision of the world, and it’s a vision many readers will innately understand in an absurd world, a beautiful vision that, as Wai reminds us, is also “tragically humorous.”

This is work that can restore one’s faith in poetry, in art’s ability to provide a connection to something more vital than can be put easily into words—call it the collective unconscious, call it the Divine, call it whatever you want—it is, when I read, exactly what I am looking for, even when I don’t know that it’s what I’m looking for until after I find it. Wai’s work is a reminder that poetry can be refreshing, entertaining, and profound all at once.

‍