Reviewed by Margaret Lee
Katabasis
by Paul Juhasz
Turning Plow Press
ISBN: 9798986899497, February 2026, Paperback, 146 pages, US$22
Katabasis, the title of Paul Juhasz’s new poetry collection, encapsulates one hundred forty-six pages of poetry in a single word. For Juhasz, this Greek word for a hero’s downward journey to the underworld refers to a sustained descent that precedes and follows a suicide attempt. He defines katabasis at the book’s beginning, but readers find his definition only after reading a dedication, three epigraphs, and a table of contents that runs for three and a half pages. These signals alert readers to the poet’s method: explanations are plural and not what they seem.
The reader needs a guide. Not until “Katabasis,” the final poem, does Juhasz’s speaker explicitly claim a guiding role: trust one who has gone through it, “it” meaning the emotions and events the poems narrate. Even then, the invitation comes in Latin, not English, using a quotation from the Aeneid: experto credite. Juhasz, whose Hungarian surname means “shepherd,” ultimately earns the reader’s trust as a reliable pathfinder.
Juhasz’s collection details multiple descents, including difficult life events: divorce in “Getting a Dog,” “Message in a Bottle,” and “To the Reader;” divorced parents in “Annulment: A Love Poem;” the unspecified loss of two sons in “I Took Down the Pictures of My Sons Today” and “My Other Son;” ill health in “Anagnorisis.” These challenges unfold in a world that knows the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima (“The Unintended Consequence of Unnecessary Expedience”), school shootings and the mistreatment of immigrants (“On the Eve”), genocide (“Thoughts of a Useful Idiot: A Prose Persona Poem”), species extinction (“On TV”), sexual abuse (“Halls of Fame: Thoughts on the Death of Pete Rose”), U.S. dependence on oil (“Last Man Standing”), and the terrorist bombing of Oklahoma City (“Murrah”). Readers risk being snagged in the density of world events, personal tragedy, and the words that describe such horrors. It is hard not to see this life as a failure, as the speaker of “Serene But Not Well” observes at the beginning of each stanza.
Repeating lines constitute one of the few auditory devices Juhasz employs. The repetitions deliver a sense of sustained suffering and loneliness. “The Old Men at Walmart” wander down their lonely aisles, wondering how it came to this. “Pray for Me” repeatedly tempers an incarcerated woman’s hope, since She has three years of probation left. “Line Drive in the Box Score” repeats a three-line passage:
They say it takes one thousand hits to fully-break in a new one (a truth not limited, I suppose, to just bats).
Battered by dark reality, Juhasz’s poems often take the dim view. The conventionally uplifting image of a bird hopping by (“Aerodynamics”) instead suggests
that you are not significant enough for the flapping of wings.
Similarly, the speaker in “Fairgrounds” declares, Nothing says you are alone quite like the fair coming to town.
Juhasz exhibits his intimate but troubled relationship with words throughout the book. His katabasis consists of lived experience. Words cannot do it justice, yet they provide necessary tools to make meaning. Juhasz writes in a literary register, typically employing sentence syntax and grammatical subordination instead of compressed poetic lines. Some poems consist solely of unlineated prose. Many poems exhibit long titles. In at least one case, the title’s length exceeds that of its poem (“A Text Message from a Hypercritical, Emotionally-Unavailable Father Marking the Occasion of the Anniversary of His Estranged Son’s Suicide Attempt”).
Juhasz refers to biblical characters (Pontius Pilate in “Halls of Fame: Thoughts on the Death of Pete Rose,” Lazarus in “Go On Without Me,” Abraham and Isaac in “After Mt. Moriah,” Moloch in “The End of All We Have Known,” and Jesus in “Go On Without Me”); classical characters (Orpheus, Odysseus, and Aeneas in “Katabasis,” Eurydice and Dionysius in “Into a Pale Blue Sunset”); and mythical creatures (the gorgon in “The Age of Heroes,” chimera in “An Old Man Contemplates Basketball While the Dishes Do Not Wash Themselves,” the Sirens in “Suicidal,” mermaids and leviathan in “Prufrock’ Mermaids”). His poems are studded with plentiful modifers and lofty vocabulary, such as catadromous, hyperplasic, pyrolatrous (“Katabasis”), cicatricose (“Prufrock’s Mermaids”), endorheic (“Four Years Later”), pareidolic (“The Unintended Consequence of Unnecessary Expedience”), crepuscular (“On Grieving”), and opprobrium (“Transhumance”), as if to match the depth of his anguish with equivalent heights of language. He quotes or alludes to Virgil, T. S. Eliot, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Allen Ginsberg, Ovid, John Fogarty, John Keats, the apostle Paul, Kurt Vonnegut, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Leonard Cohen, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Bukowski, J. R. R. Tolkien, Joseph Conrad, William Shakespeare, Stephen Stills, William Wordsworth, and Jerry Garcia, displaying the vast range of authors to whom he turns for inspiration. He argues with Emily Dickinson, insisting, “It is not a bird…. Hope is a crab, … a bottom feeder” (“Hope Is”). The poems cling to the reflective solitude of writing as solace and shelter from painful experience, but words can’t assuage the pain; they only sharpen it by expressing the breadth of despair.
Nevertheless, bright spots glimmer. Memories of a former love fuel anticipation of the lover’s return (“Phantom Kisses”). Watching a couple walk in the park in no discernable hurry engenders hope, not cynicism in “New Love”:
New love is not a function of time. It is fed by a different stream: the return of seasons, the continual remergence (sic) of the Sun, the steady presence of the moon.
After describing majestic landscapes, “Share the Road” imagines a future partner and future tendernesses: One day, when I find you, I will ask … if you wish to share these vistas with me. And …I will share with you the thoughts these vistas provoke.
The Greek sense of katabasis implies that the descent is temporary: Odysseus eventually leaves the underworld, ascending to a restored state of being. But Juhasz’s title poem instead invokes Orpheus and Lot’s wife. Like them, Juhasz’s speaker chooses to look back, training his gaze on what is left behind. And like them, this becomes the speaker’s undoing. Juhasz’s descent continues, deferring reemergence from the underworld.
Eventually, sources of healing appear. Images of water feature prominently in soothing moments, recounted in “Envy,” “Shimmer,” and “The Long Goodbye.” Two separate poems offer crystalline descriptions of catching raindrops in one’s mouth, the moisture of which stings with/the memory of rivers (“Summit”). “Armageddon” describes a child engaged in this act as blithely unaware he is what Hope looks like.
Road trips and hikes in the West occasion the healing effect of landscape. The ten-page poem “Postcards” chronicles the restoration provided by a round trip through Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. Near the end of the collection, the prose poem “Ripple” explains the balm of grand vistas. Says the speaker, after having noted the awed silence that grand views evoke,
Lack of words does not signal apathy or defeat or despair or hopelessness; it is, rather, a grounding upon a foundation more intrinsic than language, made of the primal material of mountains, gales, and waves, stretching forward and backward with a timelessness of which we were more echo and shadow, revered forgotten pieces of a once and future whole.
Juhasz struggles against the inadequacy of words to express the grandeur of the nonhuman realm. This effort furnishes another enduring source of comfort: reading and writing poetry with morning coffee on the landing of an apartment building. This is the joy of “Summer Break” for a college professor:
And at this point, that’s all the happiness I find. And many mornings, all the happiness I need.
Although qualified, such happiness remains under the poet’s control. In “Yet Another Landing Poem,” it still consoles:
I have found restoration, but have also discovered that it does not last. It fades like a memory of fog. The sting of pain and loss linger in echo and shimmer.… ….But healing is not linear. The things that heal us must be returned to with a predictable regularity. Their potency is not permanent. And so…maybe the landing is a stop along a migration, a base camp of solitude, a necessary ground zero….
Poetry sustains the traveler through katabasis and holds out hope for eventual ascent. The poet’s journey engenders trust and hedges against the kinds of despair that make suicide a credible option. Juhasz’s title poem, the only poem in the book’s fifth and final section, concludes that the journey is all. The poet’s lived experience, though desperate, can guide others on their paths. Know that I have been here before, “Katabasis” repeats. Know also that you are not the first to stumble/into this dark,//And know that you will not be the last, either./I will wait for the others as I waited for you. These words haunt the reader and color an arduous reading experience with uncanny compassion. Having clung to the therapy of travel and persisted in his pursuit of words, Juhasz wrenches meaning and hope from an epic panorama of suffering. Poet and reader emerge as companions.
About the reviewer: Margaret Lee is a poet, scholar, fiber artist, watercolor sketcher, and aspiring naturalist in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her poetry collection, Sappho Prompts (Finishing Line Press, 2026) uses the fragmentary lines of the ancient Greek poet as prompts for new poems exploring the myths, desires, and longings that characterize Sappho’s ancient songs. Margaret’s previous chapbooks with Finishing Line Press include Someone Else’s Earth (2021), Sagebrush Songs (2022), Oklahoma Summer(2023), and Orange Persephone (2025). Her poems also appear in From Behind the Mask, (Paperback-Press 2020), Echoes of Tradition: Indigenous Orientation to Community, Time, and Land (Tulsa NightWriters 2024), eMerge Magazine, Okie Modern, Atlanta Review, and Pangyrus. Her book reviews appear in American Poetry Review, Compulsive Reader, Barrelhouse, and Taos Journal of Poetry. Margaret earned a B.A. in History from Seattle University, Seattle, WA; an M.Div. from Phillips Theological Seminary, Tulsa, OK; and a Th.D. from the Melbourne College of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia. Her research and publications focus on the ancient Greek language and the history and culture of the ancient world.