To read this collection is to follow a bread-crumb path back and forth between the individual life in its particulars and something more essential and ultimately unknowable. These poems are full of “I” and “you,” in a tone of friendly beckoning, and yet at the same time they keep the reader at a distance; with their short lines and spare imagery, they don’t insist on your participation even as they invite it. 

In this way, Ethel Rackin’s fourth collection is a continuation of the work in The Forever Notes (2013) and Go On (2017), but the new poems overall reveal a more concrete connection to the dangerous present and an imagined postapocalyptic future. 

The title itself, which is at once colloquial and deeply resonant, is the first clue leading the way into the book’s abiding mystery. Does it suggest urgency, asking whether we will make it “in time,” or will we be too late? If so, for what? Or does it point instead to our being “in” time, which is always passing and within whose confines we all exist and cannot escape? While the poems are often minimal in shape and narrative specificity, they are clearly located in the here and now, among vestiges of the pandemic, the intensifying climate crisis, and the political crisis. 

Right from the beginning we are placed in a world of floods and fires, where the color green is both natural and fake. And yet there’s also a pulling back and a resistance to now, a recognition that this time we are living in will pass, as everything must. Here are some lines from “The Greening,” the book’s opening poem:

… Where was I headed—
the road seemed a dead-end given the urgency
of everything. The flowers dying violently—stems
truncated from heads—as if they’d never come
back. … 

Just a few pages later, we seem to be moving toward calm acceptance, as in the poem “Thanks.” Here, the speaker sits in a messy, vineland garden and states simply: “Things grow, you lose them.” 

Throughout the book there’s a sense of stepping forward and stepping back, as in the practice of meditation when the mind grows attached to emotions and things and then lets them go. The earth turns in a “green glassy spinning,” sun shines on a dog’s fur, peaches fall from trees. As suggested by “The Tortoise,” in which the speaker encounters a dead mouse and a “chewed up” wild hare while walking along a road, one purpose of these poems may be simply “to detail the drift.” 

The diction is not elevated by intricate poetic device and obvious formal complexity but stands firm in its modesty. Very little ego clings to these poems. And when they become too spare, when their brevity seems to verge on nothingness, a colloquial phrase or cultural reference brings it back to the present. As in “Deepwater Horizon”:

for who owns the sun 
who owns the sea? 
Well, in a sense, BP 
does— 

Images are often presented without adornment: the sun, a pool, a mirror, a lamp, a ship, a window, a lake. As if they’re being removed from the noise of specificity, like a stone pulled out from a pile of stones, where you can see its shape and contemplate it, where it becomes significant simply for its being chosen and contemplated. Most of the book’s action is centered around looking and being, as in “Dawn’s Studio,” which ends with the lines “observe the edges / of strawberry leaves / if you look long enough / become radiant!” 

The book is arranged into three sections—“Homecoming,” “Underwood,” and “Lately”—which give the individual poems some ballast and forward-motion. Near the end of the book’s first section is a series called “Recovered Dailies,” brief, dated, diary-like poems. What’s left on the page seems to be what’s left after crisis, or erasure, like clues that can be shaped into meaning. This is “9/20/18”:

found sparrows
in my chest
this morning—
a golden penny
what more can I offer
a trace of what
I was

The section ends with “Forge,” a longer poem, in which “There will not always be water. / There will not always be string.” It leads straight to the opening poem of section 2, in which the poem “Fire” picks up where “Forge” left off. Both are longer poems about end times, almost emotionless, accepting, as in a state of resigned preparation. Here are the opening lines from “Fire”:

Before paper became a rare commodity.
Before the need arose to go anywhere
to put on anything special
there was a longing in me that
would not be named. There was 
a lion breaking free and a child
who kept caging him.

Near the end of this section is another series of time-stamped poems, but instead of by date they are named by hours, bringing us around to the book’s shape and theme again but from a different angle. Here is “1 PM” in its entirety:

You’re absolutely perfect
she said to the dog, the goat
the bee—
the last you’d expect 
to shine—
and in this way
she became me.

“Lately,” the final section, is the sparest and shortest of the three. And it does feel late now—late in the day, late in life, late in human history, with even less to cling to. When the section and thus the book ends, everything that came before it shifts slightly, comes into a new focus. To cite the final poem would feel like a spoiler; suffice it to say that through a simple gesture it offers a means of letting go that does not point to death or obliteration but toward a different a kind of freedom.

And yet these poems are sly and humble, and don’t take themselves as seriously as all that. Because who knows, really, they seem to say. It’s enough sometimes just to marvel over, and feel gratitude for, the everyday things: women arranging themselves for photos, neighbors coming in and out of view, ocean waves and cottage doors. No need to find your way back to an earlier self or an earlier time when things might have been simpler, less painful. All that matters is now, until this too passes, you turn the page, and get caught up again in time.