Review: Waiting for the Dead to Speak

Waiting for the Dead to Speak by Brian Fanelli
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am pleased and proud to discover that Brian Fanelli is my neighbor and colleague – even though I have never met him. He teaches up the street from me at Lackawanna College, and he grew up in the region where I live now.

There’s a lot to like in this collection. In it, Fanelli reflects on what it was like to grow up here, a place where an interest in larger questions of social justice and acceptance could sometimes be met with violence, but he never condemns the place either. He loves it the way you love a mutt, wet nose and all.

He reflects as well on his experience as an adjunct faculty member – something I am only now surprised to have seen so little poetry about – about losing his father, and about (apparently) the house he and his now ex-wife bought together.

I was immediately taken by the first of these, “For Jimmy, Who Bruised My Ribs and Busted My Nose,” for a childhood bully. As he ends it, “This poem is for the bully who never cried,/ who hid belt lashes from us, who ran from the sound/ of his father’s battered Ford tracking him down,/ the son whose hands tightened to fists like his father’s,/ who uncurled his fingers to study new blood,/ and then extended a hand to lift me up.” It sets the tone for the ambivalent affection he has for our Northeast Pennsylvania region, and it stands as one of the best in the collection.

A couple of others appeal to me as well for their locale. “At Exit 170, I-81, I Blast the Ramones” tells of him thinking of a friend killed in an accident at the spot. It’s strange for me, who takes the exit everyday on my way home from work, to think of it as a space quietly hallowed by a loss I never knew.

“Temp Worker” spins a thoughtful poem about a man who, for a couple months between February and April 15, gets paid to dress as a Statue of Liberty and twirl a sign to promote a tax preparation service. I know the exact mall Fanelli names, and I think I’ve seen the very man he describes. Again, it’s a pleasure to see such poems built on the everyday experience we share.

My favorite of the teaching poems is “Unwritten,” about an angry but promising student who, because of addiction problems, has to suspend his semester. There’s a real beauty there in the idea that the student’s best work is ‘unwritten,’ that it will probably remain so. I love the poignancy of that aspect of teaching, and I suspect Fanelli – whose students are more economically vulnerable than mine – is all too familiar with it.

While I do admire many of the poems here – and while there are none I’d point to as disappointing – I do wish these were more carefully culled. In a few cases, we get what seem to be the same germ sprouted into similar poems. I think this would be an overall stronger collection if Fanelli removed 15-20 of the 75 or so that are here. That is, the repeated themes sometimes obscure one another where it might be stronger if some of the poems, standing more alone, focused the ideas behind them.

Bottom line, though, I am glad to get a sense of some of the good work coming out of our region. We’re a small enough town that I expect I’ll run into Brian before too long, and I’m glad to be able to admire his work.


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