Resurrecting Fires, Friends, and Foes: On Jamie Sullivan's "Pack of Lies"

Jamie Sullivan | Pack of Lies | Main Street Rag Publishing | April 2020 | 81 Pages

In Jamie Sullivan’s debut poetry collection, Pack of Lies, the wild among us “step like women from robes onto the edges of the highway” and get “Madonna’s face tattooed just below a navel.” Queens, knaves, freaks, and maybe an ace or two celebrate abandonment, heartache, and life in cornfields, trailer parks, bottom-less bars, and nights fueled with black coffee. 

Sullivan’s collection is a pull-apart heart. Faith enters from time to time by way of a neon-blue crucifix and chaos theory—you get my drift. Almost every page of the book is full of goodness and a whole lotta grit. Its narrative voices are haunting. We follow the people who inhabit the pages down hallways and corridors, alleys and highways.

Great writers like David Sedaris, Jeffrey McDaniel, Maria Gillan, and George Bilgere aren’t afraid to point out their flaws, to rub a little dirt in their wounds. The sharp empathy and subtle shamelessness that Sullivan presents is what readers connect with. He has a knack for telling it straight, shaken and sly. Take the poem “Home Economics,” which focuses on a shy, geeky woman, sitting on a dorm bed, knees together, feet on the floor, revising the narrator’s paper on how to inseminate a sow artificially. Sullivan literally leaves you at the edge—he paints his Hopper picture with words. You’re left wondering, what next? And aren’t we all a bit geeky and shy? That’s his hook. And there’s plenty of them throughout this collection.

I have a terrible habit of dog-earring the bottom corner of pages in poetry books. Those are the pages I go to, my absolute favorites. If it’s a pretty damn good poem, then the top corner gets turned—this is a fine system I have. In this collection, nearly all the bottom edges are turned on one side of the page so that I can’t dog-ear its opposite side. That’s how fantastic these poems are. I’ve told the author I only wish there were more. Can you take this poem and make it into a story? Tell me more? The poems have that much lift. For example, I re-read the poem “Bank Shot” three times in the last hour and still can’t get enough. It’s got the haunting feel of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son in 6 stanzas:

The bent notes and keening guitars made
the dread fade; head floating, he felt alive.
He could sleep now without a thought or dream
into the next day and closer to night again.

One night in August he blacked out
on the couch with a lit cigarette,
smoked all night before he quit for good.
Once again he forgot to call it.

In poems like “Flat,” what I like is Sullivan’s humor, his description of place, and his un-afraid tendency to identify what we might not have here in the Midwest. The last time I was in New York a driver picked me up at the Newark airport and told me how he and his wife lived outside of the city because it’s too expensive, that it took them about a roughly two-and-a-half-hour drive to see a show on Broadway or do something else in the Big Apple. I asked him how often he did that. He said maybe once or twice a year, a sort of mini-vacation. I couldn’t tell if he liked the place he called home or not.

Out here in the Midwest, there’s a bit more space, a little more wind, a lot more elbow room. It’s the big empty. We appreciate what we have and don’t have. Sullivan knows this and celebrates his small parcel of land. He owns it:

warehouses and factories, the storage
units, which may hide another smaller town,
hunker close in a city planned by
a flat earth society auxiliary.

The VFW hall is old as Hopalong
Cassidy on a Saturday afternoon
but the fast food outfits and the gas
station, one called Freedom, are bright with glass

and red white and blue perk.

Sullivan and I teach at the same federal prison. In poems like “One Night at the Prison Camp” and “Doing Time,” he captures the voices—the internal dialogues and dilemmas that are familiar to these men—something good teachers observe after years of immersion. He understands the hundreds of months that they will serve. In “Doing Time,” he writes:

These men are frisked by time
who sit outside their lives
watching from a sinkhole of ten years
their youth an escaping vapor…

Time is a puzzle of numbers they move
through without solving. Ten ounces, 144 months
sentences to break into bits, sift, weigh, slice.
Talk down the panic. Deal with it.

Then you have a poem like “The Diary of Bowdie Lautermilk.” Who the hell is he? An amalgamation of the poet’s scrapbooks? And why all of a sudden does he remind you of the bullies, tough hipsters?

The settings of poems like “Quick Stop,” where the narrator is beset by the ache, angst, and yearning of adolescence and spends all day staring at hot dog rollers, Little Debbies, and Slim Jims, is reminiscent of scenes from the cult classic, Clerks, or a Coen Brothers movie where these characters would shine: “‘Rob this place, someone,’ he thinks, / and locks the door. What would be missed?”

In “Thimble,” there’s not an unusual character in sight; instead, Sullivan examines a long-gone object:

How it snugs on a finger,
a condom of warm silver,
the dome of St. Paul.
The thimble in the tomb
holds a bone, waiting.

The poetry is always working on multiple levels—object and soul, history, and what we’ve done to ourselves and each other. It all comes to light by scrutinizing a sewing apparatus.

There are poems such as “Algebra”—everyone recognizes the subject, most hate it. At first glance, it represents teenage anger and rebellion in the classroom, but after a re-read, it seems to capture a sentiment that most male adolescents are all too familiar with: we will only rebel so long. Sooner or later, we have to pick up the pieces we’ve fumbled. Sooner or later, we realize that our teachers (like Father Sherman in the poem) or our folks—do, in fact, have our best interests in mind.

Part of me wants so desperately for Sullivan to turn his poems into prose. I seldom have such a longing for the diverse characters and voices he presents. Like the misfits and down-on-their-luck people of my life, so many have become upstanding citizens whom I wouldn’t recognize if I tripped into them. Why do we keep returning to these people from our past lives? Why do they walk in our shadows and play hide and seek? Jamie Sullivan has resurrected fires, friends, and foes within me I thought I’d buried long ago. Read the poem “Annabelle,” and you too will find yourself in the isle of an antique store poking your strange lost key into a reel you thought you’d lost forever. There are just enough details here to pull me back to my past. Isn’t that what good art does? It makes you remember your own story. It polishes off a memory that you punched away. Good art—great poetry—inspires you to celebrate life and continue to create.

These inimitable poems are gritty and gracious, intimate and loud. A Pack of Lies simply rings true.