Knucklehead

Zach Czaia's new poetry collection, Knucklehead, offers signposts, way stations, and commanding views along one person's journey toward enlightenment and compassion through living a fully human life, day by day. The eponymous knucklehead is a stumbler, with doubts, inadequacies, and regrets, but he is also endowed with plenty of humor and spirit, and he described the foibles of teaching, the tangle of emotions associated with marriage, and the fervent desire to live a life of simplicity, meaning, and conscience. Many of the poems draw on Biblical references that present challenges, but also offer comfort. The desire to understand, to measure up, to follow through, is a source of incessant struggle that brings tension and energy to every line.

In one long poem Czaia takes Dante as a guide, crying out to him as a man of faith but also a fellow-seeker. In another poem he revisits his own childhood years, longing for the kind of certitude that he felt in his older brother's pronouncements, even when they turned out to be wrong. The death of George Floyd, which took place a few blocks from Czaia's house, is occasion for another extended meditation on our moral obligations.