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Buy it direct from Lethe Press or from our Amazon.com store - Tricky Serum: An Elixir of Poems  

Recently, I had the great pleasure of attending a live simulcast of the Lincoln Center’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company (with Patti LuPone and Neil Patrick Harris).  When leaving the theatre (after lifting up a silent prayer of immense gratitude for technology that always those of us in the hinterlands to enjoy the magic that is the New York stage), I said to my friend, “I don’t know how anyone negotiates an emotional life without the help of Broadway musicals.”  I wasn’t joking.  Lyricists like Stephen Sondheim, William Finn, John Bucchino and countless others have the capacity to combine recognition and revelation in one or two well-crafted phrases, such that one is reoriented to the world and its fundamental character.  While these luminaries need not fear any stiff competition from Dan Stone, in his recent collection, Tricky Serum: An Elixir of Poems, Stone sometimes manages to capture an insight so perfectly in an unexpected turn of phrase that the reader cannot help but pause to adjust to the new vision made possible.

Stone claims that his “poems address the trick prospect of elixirs . . . the quest for the substance of our dreams, the magic potion for fulfilling what we hold to be our fondest and often most elusive desires.”  With this description in mind, I found the second section, “Orpheus Ascending,” the most successful in the book.  Here, Stone juxtaposes poems with a light touch alongside those with a bleaker ethos, poems about lust with poems about other emotional states, poems that seem fairly straightforward with poems that are more ethereal.  “Seeing in the Dark,” for example, describes the pleasures of watching a lover sleep, but the opening line “You slipped away first,” evokes a larger relational context in which the poet is rarely the one who gets to watch, observe and enjoy his lover in the “warm bath of a night.”  Similarly, “Keepsake,” which contains a plea about storing a poem “I wrote for you” in the “right” place, offers a mournful meditation on getting lost in the clutter and debris of a lover’s life.  In “Rough,” Stone explores the problematic of sexual consent, and in “Flash of Abdication: The Mirror Smashed,” probably the best poem in this section, the poet declaims all the identities he will not assume for his lover:  “I’m not the priest who lets you off the hook,/not your knight in armor,/not your long lost you come home/to claim his rightful place./Not the sacrificial lamb/and certainly not your savior/sent to make sure you feel good . . . ./I’ll just be over here,/knowing you can do it,/happy to be off the cross./If you need a different frame,/you’re more than welcome to the wood.”  It’s not that any of these images bristle with uniqueness, but their precise combination and their specific inflection provide fresh perspective. 

The collection’s opening poem, “Longings and Gratitudes,” contains one of Stone’s most memorable lines.  When describing what it feels like to live alone, he writes, “I notice sometimes/when I pack to leave/and there’s no toothbrush/widowed in the stand,/content to save my place.”  Similarly, “Playing Games” takes a very familiar idea as its starting point, but cleverly uses common children’s games as metaphors for the behaviors expected of the poet and his lover.  “Two Tickets” captures beautifully the various anxieties that bubble up when waiting for a date to arrive and “Tattoos and Torn Jeans” characterizes writing as a form of sexual appropriation.  Overall, however, the poems in Part One, “A Dream about a Dream,” in which the poet expresses his struggles to find love . . . to overcome his “onlyness” (“The View”) struck me as a little too obvious, a little too one note, a little too desperate.  “Stuck,” for example, is a mournful ode to the desire to change one’s hairstyle and not being able to do it, and “The Kiss I Want” seemed to be trying a bit too hard.

The poem’s of the collections final part, “Tricky Serum,” were the least successful.  Voiced as Oprah Winfrey-esque speech about self-love and receiving back one’s intentions from the universe, they read like a paraphrase of The Secret.  (For readers who find this kind of valorization of self-esteem to be an important and insightful intervention, the poems of this section are as thoughtfully crafted as those found in the rest of the collection.)  Even here, however, Stone demonstrates his capacity for making images that might seem overdone fresh through his gifts with language.  In “Searching for Oz,” for example, Stone returns to this gay classic, but uses the reader’s familiarity to his advantage: “It’s not about forgiveness from sin/despite the finger still pointed by false prophets who straddle truth like a broomstick/between their fat thighs./They have no power here.//Since the cyclone swept us away/it’s a world no longer in black or white./There’s so much to see and the freedom to play,/to dance in the street and to sleep in a field/of wide-eyed late bloomer/who also fell out of the sky.”

Insofar as Stone represents the collection as addressing “the substance of our dreams . . . [and] what we hold to be our fondest and often most elusive desires,” I found his vision too circumscribed.  According to this set of poems, our dreams have to do only with finding romantic love, a compatible sexual partner and the ability to love our selves.  Is this the range of our desiring capacity?  What about our wishes related to family (of choice, of origin), health, world peace, spiritual insight, human dignity?  What about the pleasures of work, friendship, political struggle, art?  As noted throughout, Stone has a genuine capacity for restating and reimagining what we think we know in new terms, he has the ability to say what we have only been inchoately thinking and revealing us to ourselves.  It would be interesting to see him expand his vision more broadly to the various aspects of life that evoke desire and about which we dream.

Stone concludes his collection provocatively.  As he states at the beginning, “the poems are intended to read as a progression, a journey through the process of seeking, finding and relinquishing our convictions about what we need or want . . . .”  But the last line of the last poem in this progressive journey suspends the journey’s conclusion:  “There’s a natural rhythm to creating,/ a single-mindedness that show/I’m just getting started.”  So, Dan Stone has not finished trying to enchant us yet. 

Reviewed by Kent Brintnall