Reviewed by Sam Wingfield-Karpowitz
The Unnumbered Anniversaries
by Kurt Olsson
Fernwood Press
September 2025, Paperback, 96 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1594981715
Reading Kurt Olsson’s The Unnumbered Anniversaries is like believing that you’re walking a route you’ve taken since childhood, then waking up, that same landscape outside the bedroom window. It’s hard to separate the dream from the real. And it becomes true that the dream and the real are inseparable, maybe the same. In Olsson’s collection a child is “Willie Mays sprinting into / and through the ever after, making the catch / that saves the world.” In another poem, “Some pain never goes away.”
The book cultivates an extraordinary expanse of figurative land, on which walks Jesus H. Christ, the Son of God “beneath his halo” and the name spit over a “jam[med] baby toe”; the you who “arrive[s] / at the same airport you took off from”; and the “Lost Head of the Android Philip K. Dick,” who asserts, “Just because something exists doesn’t mean / it’s real.” Methods of documenting these figures–memory, photograph, the poem–are at once present and absent. “I have the pictures somewhere,” notes the speaker of “The Best of a Bad Year,” ending the poem with the certainty of possession, but the place of possession unknowable. This is the certain sort of faith that binds Olsson’s book: the speakers believe in what they cannot see, in what they have lost. “Only while you’re a child / do you look up and try to count the stars.” In the pages floats the grief provoked by an adult forfeiture of wonder, but the poems of The Unnumbered Anniversaries certainly do look up and try to count the stars.
One such poem is called “The Correct Use of Each Other.” Here the constellations are made of language, of social connection and disconnection, of the strange choices we find ourselves making.
Talking about dead pets, Stephanie, the woman from Tulsa,
told me about her parakeet and how she’d kept it in the freezer,
between the lima beans and broccoli, neither of which she liked . . .
The poem recalls another hockey-bleachers exchange, this one from high school, when the speaker “took a senior / with the sweetest eyelashes to a game” and handed her a “Valentine’s horror story” that he wrote, remembering “how when she finished she pulled / a pen from her purse and started to mark up the story, / explaining when to use ‘each other’ and when ‘one another.’” The speaker ends up with her family in their living room, wishing to be with his own parents, a wish that the poem transposes onto Stephanie: “I’m sure.
Stephanie / from Tulsa wished she never put the parakeet in her freezer.” We all have carcasses maintaining in the freezers of our minds, the poem might suggest, viscerally reminding us of our choices, reminding us of the ones we love that we’d rather be with, that the door can be shut on memory but it does not decompose.
And yet pages later “Sixty Pieces of Word” addresses its reader with the opposite assertion. “The poem you read now / you will forget / and is designed to be / whereas most /aspire otherwise.” Olsson is not just comfortable inside paradox–his poems insist on it, live through it. Their dreams are real, the real is all a dream, they wonder at their own contradictions, sometimes they care, other times they don’t. Beautifully, The Unnumbered Anniversaries “lets its big wild heart / wear its ragged self out.
About the reviewer: Sam Wingfield-Karpowitz is a MA student in Creative Writing at University College Cork. He is from Alexandria, Virginia, and has since lived in Minnesota and northern California before arriving in Cork.