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Relatable. Affecting. Witty. And scrubbed of all pretension… The Unnumbered Anniversaries might well change your idea of not just what poetry is, but all that poetry can be. Indeed, this is not a collection to be read once and set aside with a pleasant nod or two, but rather an experience you will return to with cherished frequency. As Olsson observes in his slyly subversive penultimate entry, “At some point, you will thank God whether you believe or not.” Amen!

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Kurt Olsson reminds us that nostalgia is not to be trusted and that days can be measured by “after I shoved a bean up my nose / but before I gave in and walked out on my life.” And yet The Unnumbered Anniversaries is full of small, sweet pleasures, as long as you can take comfort in the absurd, the temporary, and the grace of Willie Mays making a world-saving catch. As this collection proceeds, its expanse gets ever wilder-as if the opening poem, “The Best of a Bad Year,” has set off a Rube Goldberg-ian sequence of widening chaos-and Olsson awes us with his sprightly intellect, unexpected imagery, and impeccable phrasing. Is it a big toe or a bottlenose dolphin? Yes.

Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode

Mostly brief but always poignant and well-crafted, Kurt Olsson’s “many small songs to loss” in this new collection are meditations on the emotional equivalent of phantom limb syndrome. Even after a relationship has ended, Olsson reminds us, the memory and the pain remain. The catalog of experiences recounted here reads like a litany of failings: bad marriages, several jobs, and “a Wall Street deal gone bust” among them. And the ghosts materialize in varied guises, including “the dented wreck/ I’d gotten/ in the settlement,” “a three-legged dog” in lieu of children from “a second marriage worse than the first,” and “old scars/ now invisible.” On balance, though, the poems here are not merely confessional or mournful. For Olsson, the myriad experiences of loss add up “to a life I look back on now and wonder.” The wonder lies, perhaps, in how he-or any of us-manages to survive it all but assuredly also in how we find redemption in making “what’s old new again.”

Michael Blanchard, editor of SLANT: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and author of The Pearl Diver’s Daughter & Other Poems

In his poem “What I’ve Learned Living on Other Planets,” Kurt Olsson writes, “Never travel with anyone who says, ‘Wake me when we get there.'” Of course, such a non-companion would miss the journey, something Olsson with his imaginative wanderings, unexpected byways, and keen observations will not allow us to do. These poems, like a new landscape, challenge the way we see, often finding mystery or honor in the mundane: dishes in a tub of water become thrashing fish, the tires blown off junkers fume “like the blowsy heads of dandelions,” and we are reminded of an era when bottle caps, soda cans, and pant cuffs served as ashtrays. Olsson brings us as close to the regular at the bar who “never eats anything, not even the popcorn” as he does to the carpenter who, simply trying to make a living, crafts Christ’s cross or to the Russian who, once forced to burn books simply to keep from freezing, buries his nose in one he cannot read just to breathe it in. We are humbled in our understanding of how easily we could be any of them. The Unnumbered Anniversaries will make you laugh one moment, mesmerize you the next, and then shatter you with its forthright yet understated and empathic renderings of experiences that devastate. Still, around most every corner, we sense the poet’s mission “to say what cannot but is,/ and not what can be but isn’t.”

Brenda Cárdenas, author of Trace

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