Sum of Every Lost Ship

It is very easy to lose yourself in the brave, lonely world of Allison Titus’s Sum of Every Lost Ship. Her spare and questioning aesthetic is pleasing, and her subjects bristle just enough to provide a wonderful chemistry. Throughout her poems, she maintains a careful beauty and distance, and she creates a unique world of displacement, longing, and ultimately, survival.

It is very easy to lose yourself in the brave, lonely world of Allison Titus’s Sum of Every Lost Ship. Her spare and questioning aesthetic is pleasing, and her subjects bristle just enough to provide a wonderful chemistry. Throughout her poems, she maintains a careful beauty and distance, and she creates a unique world of displacement, longing, and ultimately, survival.

Sum of Every Lost Ship begins with the epigraph “There is a hotel in the heart of every man,” from Don DeLillo’s Americana, and it is without a doubt a perfect opener; it epitomizes the uprooted nature of Titus’s poetry. Despite the specific places her poetry inhabits, the narrator always conveys a sense of transience. This disjointedness feels very controlled; Titus does not give way to distraction.

Distance, both physical and emotional, is important in this collection. Part Three, which contains a sustained poem titled “From the Lost Diary of Anna Anderson,” plays with this idea of emotional distance. Found almost drowned in a river in Berlin, the narrator refuses to give her name or any personal information, refuses to admit suicide attempt or accident. Shuffled from hospital to asylum, the narrator tells us,

What keeps me living is knowing I once knew how,
and everything my body memorized:

I am strange among strangers the doctor thinks me insane.
But insanity does not know one’s own name.
It has nothing to do with not telling it.

In keeping with the epigraph, motels make several appearances. In fact, there are four poems called “Motel” in this collection (all lovely little boxy prose poems). But besides that, motels are often the setting for Titus’s poems. “Ice Storm” opens,

Somewhere ice is a room
to sleep in. A motel
halfway between
dusk and dawn,
an ailment pulled
from the cupboard,
what cure to repair
this indiscretion.

In “Vacant” she writes, “I am already / black strands of hair // on the flat white pillow.”

There is also a hinted at broken heart; many mentions are made of “our one good year.” Don’t let the mentions of broken-heartedness fool you though; this is no overly emotional, static grief. This is a constantly moving and exploring sadness; it is a broken heart surveying the view of towns all over the country as it relives the hours and days of a life that held little in the way of traditional romance.

There is a sustained and affected dissonance in Sum of Every Lost Ship. At its best, it is cohesive and pleasurably disorienting. (As a disclaimer, I find nothing wrong with leaving a poem without really knowing what “happened” in it – that is one of the things I like best about poetry.) Titus’s poetry contains a refreshing use of language, and because of her carefully constructed enigmatic storyline, a version of plot is deftly woven into the lines; this prevents the reader from unmooring during the flights of her language. In Sum of Every Lost Ship, the reader doesn’t always know where the poem’s language (or the poem’s narrative, for that matter) will take her. And yet, in Titus’s able hands, it is easy to give up the reins to this brave and curious vision.