Constellation Route, by Matthew Olzmann, is a collection of poetry concerning politics, relationships, mythology and history, fate, and time. Olzmann writes in a casual, modern style that makes heavy topics feel conversational, drawing on his background in improv to give his poems meaning and rhythm. He leans on humor and pop culture to discuss serious subjects in American life, but never in a way that feels preachy. The collection is also unusual in its form: most of it is written as letters to different people, sent, as the title suggests, along a constellation route through the US Postal Service.
Politics
Political themes enshroud the entirety of Olzmann's book — they're inescapable, and inextricably linked to the form of his poems. The very first poem reveals his disillusionment with American politics: "A good place to hide a sociopath is a full-length mirror. / A good place to hide that mirror is the heart of America" ("Letter to Bruce Wayne," 6). He goes on to discuss how in Gotham City, at least, the villains are obvious — the Joker with his signature gimmick, say — but in the real world, villainy hides in all of us. He writes about gun violence in couplets, their shortness and precision almost feeling like bullets in their own right: "A bullet doesn't care / about aim, it doesn't / distinguish between / the innocent and the innocent" ("Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz," 24). He even takes on racial politics in a poem about how his wife wants him to introduce them, and mention that she is Black, for her own safety: "She wants me to mention it will be safer for her this way, / safer than if she were to ring your doorbell / and introduce herself, by herself" ("Letter to My Future Neighbors," 51). Together, the poems paint a grim picture, but each one is handled meaningfully, formatted to suit its subject. In "Letter to Bruce Wayne," the reader doesn't even realize the poem is about politics until it's most of the way through — and by then, you're already drawn in.
Pop Culture
Olzmann's discussion of politics links closely to his use of pop culture, and what pop culture teaches us about ourselves. He uses Gotham City as a foil for America: "But here is Gotham City and I've been / so naive: believing the truth of the old mythologies. / How they promised a recognizable villain, / a clown with a ruby-slashed mouth, a lunatic's laugh" ("Letter to Bruce Wayne," 6). His point is that villains aren't recognizable the way they are in Gotham and in comic books, however much we might want them to be. He's also interested in wanting to escape this universe and the heaviness of its politics — a longing that rings truer than ever given the wars in Ukraine and Gaza — when he writes that "there are hundreds of reasons like this / to long to be from some other galaxy, / century, or dimension" ("Letter Written While Waiting in Line at Comic Con," 10). His poem titles alone show how Olzmann can write about anything, even standing in line somewhere, and still make it meaningful.
He does not shove a message into your mouth; he asks you to truly think about it. That is what good poetry does — it provokes thought.
Activism
Olzmann doesn't stop at diagnosing politics. He goes further, asking his readers what we can do to make a difference in this world. He doesn't just set up the problem; he looks for solutions in open-ended, thought-provoking poems. Discussing the environment, he asks: "Do you ever worry that because your voice is impossible to hear, maybe no one will make the effort? That you can work really hard and try to be a good person and try to make a difference in your community, but then — at the end of the day — the waves will just swallow you whole?" ("Fourteen Letters to a 52-Hertz Whale," 43). This multi-section prose poem takes on a question many of us grapple with: whether our individual efforts make any difference at all. Olzmann doesn't offer an answer, but he pushes readers to think about it, and that's the point. He does not shove a message into your mouth; he asks you to truly think about it. That is what good poetry does — it provokes thought. He's honest, too, about his own difficulties with doing good, writing, "There are moments when compassion is a yes / or no question. We can donate our organs / to strangers or be buried with all our worldly possessions. / We can save the drowning man, or just think about it. / Sometimes there can be no hesitation. / And then I hesitate" ("Letter to a Man Drowning in a Folktale," 55). Is he a bad person for hesitating? Or is he simply human, like the rest of us, grappling with a choice that should be simple in practice and rarely is?
Olzmann also reaches for religious and mythological language to describe the burdens the world places on us. Closely linked to the last poem, he says, "I won't die for anyone / not the way religion has taught me" ("Letter to Matthew Olzmann from Cathy Linh Che on Saintliness," 16). It's sympathetic to be exhausted from fighting all the time, from trying to do good when the world keeps beating you down. He writes, "One weary seraph, malfunctioning and tired / from the long fight against gravity and malevolence. / His wings. They're removable. Designed to be / unloosed when the burden of flight exceeds / the desire for flight" ("Wing Case," 77). It's okay to get tired — to put the burden down for a while, to take your wings off, as it were.
History
Throughout the book, alongside the difficult subjects above, Olzmann uses history and time as frameworks for asking what impact we actually make on the world around us. He asks large, ponderous questions with no answer, questions that reflect the confusion running through the whole book. He writes: "Fate makes an animal of us all, and rides us / through the village at sunrise where we are judged. / But we designed those villages" ("Letter to the Horse You Rode In On," 8). So much of human judgment is self-imposed, and he points that out directly. He takes on climate change and how it will reshape the world around us: "We still had the night sky back then, / and like our ancestors, we admired / its illuminated doodles / of scorpion outlines and upside-down ladles" ("Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now," 100). In this poem, the sky is completely blotted out by pollution, and it evokes a nostalgia for a history already gone. A similar feeling surfaces in another poem: "History / is an ash-whitened field, / a twenty-square-mile arc of unremarkable flatness / in a space where some ancient breathing things / once stood (the way I now stand), their limbs / stretching to feel the wind weave / through their branches and fingers" ("Letter to the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America," 17). The world changes so much, and the nostalgia for times long gone, or times we'll never see, isn't even political — just wistful. How much has the oldest pine tree seen? Humans are short-lived by comparison, and can hardly experience as much. It's beautiful, and sad, and wonderful, all at the same time.
Constellation Route is ultimately a series of letters asking the world: what impact do we make? Is it our job to do better? What if we cannot? Who are we, as we walk the grand route of the universe? Themes of fate, history, and politics are wrapped in the language of pop culture, religion, and mythology, all delivered in Olzmann's unique, casual diction.
