Reviewed by Aline Soules

Penultimates: The Now & the Not-Yet
by Thomas Farber
El León Literary Arts & Mānoa Books
January 2024, Paperback, 114 pages, ISBN-13: 979-8987371824

Open the book and the reader is given quotes by Mark Strand, Townes Van Zandt, and Peter Schjeldahl. What they have in common is death, both as a subject and as a fact because Farber lists the birth and death dates of all three authors. Farber gives all dead persons quoted in these eclectic riffs birth and death dates, a constant reminder of the end.

There is also an Author’s Note, in which he tells the reader that when he started to write after his last publication in 2021, “one impulse was to avoid…The Denial of Death.” He goes on to write, “As for what ensued…” followed by a wide list of thoughts from “Glimpses” through “Qualms” and “Exasperations” and “Tokes of malice” to “Savorings.” He asks, “Death at least acknowledged, was death not denied? / Fair question.” He ends with Ecclesiastes: “to every thing there is a season…”

The conversational tone, creating intimate connection with the reader, carries through the book as he muses about death and near-death. The reader is plunged into a cacophony of thoughts piling up on each other. In “An Effort to Get Doomscrolling Out of My System,” Farber bombards the reader with subjects, yawing from one to the other in staccato delivery, for example, this section from the middle of the piece:

Still…climate change; year three of the pandemic; drought; inflation. Christian
(Whiter-than-White) nationalism. Robocalls, spam, shit-posters, bots, clickbait—
Anything to keep you in the frenzy of touchless touching. Under somebody’s
thumb.
Whose thumb?
Go fish.

Farber rarely lets the reader take a breath through the entire collection. Whether he’s starting his explorations with “Re William Blake (1757-1827)” or “Neighbors” or “School Days,” there’s every chance he’ll segue to another seemingly unrelated topic, although he generally connects them in the end. For example, in “Die Already!” he lambasts the U.S., beginning:

It didn’t have to be the American way. Japan’s COVID-19 death rate is one-
twelfth of ours. No mask or vaccination mandates, no lockdowns or mass surveil-
lance, just peer pressing. Shaming, or, put another way, cooperation.

He then references a Washington Post story about Chad Carswell, a man with kidney disease who was turned down by the hospital for a transplant because his chances of survival were lower as an anti-vaxxer. Carswell was so adamant, he said he’d “see you on the other side” rather than get the shot, insisting on “standing up for our rights.” For him, this was about choice and freedom. Farber then quotes Huey Long (1893-1935), the New Hampshire state motto, and Patrick Henry (1736-1799) on the subject of freedom or death. He ends: “You want it? Shit, man, you got it!”

The next piece is “Portent,” and the reader is whipped to “The tropics” to walk the beach, check the crabs, surf, pick up beach trash, riff on a middle-aged guy in “superb shape,” and consider Jack “in his seventies,” “happy Democrats in a one-party town,” and how Ray died in Vegas. But Ray had been partying “pretty hard,” which Farber calls “A compensatory gift…allowing us to put some distance between Ray’s heart attack and our present—and anticipated—conditions.” From there, everyone goes on with living “and/or, to paraphrase Mark Strand, go on with our dying.”

The tone of these poems, the wry humor, and the irony keep the reader reading. Farber begins “Meant to Be”:

Re speaking ill of the dead: in common law, the dead have no rights, can suffer no
wrongs (actio personalis moritur cum persona). Corpses cannot marry, divorce, or
vote, be slandered or defamed.

He then gives the reader details about Dr. Wayne Dyer (1940-2015) who wrote:

…more than forty books, one of which has sold 
one hundred million copies. And what kind of genius, you ask, could warrant so 
many readers? In The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain (1835-1910), a young
Satan says, “Oh, it’s true. I know your race. It is made up of sheep.”

The next section is Dyer’s view of himself, how he was conceived on the day that Hitler [1899-1945] invaded Poland, born the day the Nazis invaded the low countries, and saw the Holocaust coming. When Dyer died, “he left his body, returning to Infinite Source to embark on his next adventure.” Farber ends with “No need, then, to add R.I.P.”

His last piece, “Homecomings,” begins “Safe ’n sound. Everything in its place in the cottage…” We sense his wistfulness when he writes: “The continuum continuing. Couldn’t this just go on and on?” He then offers a list of sixteen “things and moments,” wildly different, from the first—“End-of-summer white peaches!—to his “musician-wife, reunited with her piano.” He muses on what will happen to her after he’s gone, what she’ll do, and returns to the quote, “To every thing there is a season,” adding “But not to insist that things end.” He references a “past life in nineteenth-century China,” laughs at the thought, “but then again who’s to say?”

He ends with a riff on the “fate of the universe(s)—Big Crunch, Big Freeze, Big Rip, Heat Death, Vacuum Decay?” He promises: “I’ll try—like Hell!—to let you know from The Other Side. If, that is, there are Sides.”

He offers an “Afterword” in which he wonders, “If there’s another book ‘in me’ as they used to say, Ultimates (!) will no doubt include pages of amends.”

After the breathtaking ride through Penultimates, let’s hope there is another opportunity for readers to enjoy another work by this irrepressible author.

About the reviewer: Aline Soules’ work has appeared in such publications as the Kenyon Review, Houston Literary Review, Poetry Midwest, Galway Review, and Flash Fiction Magazine.  Her book reviews have been published by Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review, and others. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Online: https://alinesoules.com