The Recycling

“Strange,” begins Joey Connolly’s second collection, The Recycling. And it is strange, recycling, both the “Thursday-night chore” and the word:

Strange noun full of verb, noun
bending to verb, strange
idea of repeating repetition,
repetition bending to noun,
to fixity, the plastic box full of
plastic boxes […]

For a poet at midcareer, recycling is a nerve-wracking emblem of “repeating repetition”: year after year, the same emotional ruts, linguistic loop-de-loops, and formula-bound relationships. But recycling also inspires thrifty formal innovations. One poem repeats, five times over, the increasingly self-referential sentence: “There’s love in the way the panels are pried up and replaced.” Two other poems are identical, save for their titles: the first is “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1994–2023”; the second, “Untitled.”

Of The Recycling’s 45 epigraphs—recycling sentences from Plato, Jane Austen, Bhanu Kapil, and more—the most revealing comes from Jennifer Aniston, post-Friends: “It’s sad, something coming to an end. It cracks you open, in a way—cracks you open to feeling.” Connolly’s subjects are poignant instances of “coming to an end”: breaking up, losing “people, countrysides.” Stylistically, though, he resists endings at all costs. Few contemporary UK poets are such virtuosic listers—establishing patterns, escalating, backtracking, bringing a riffing ingenuity to questions as sobering as why be good, 

                                                                          […] As
an example to others? What others? For the beauty
of the solidarity in the socialist songbook? For the
scouring rhetorical powerstance of anarchism? Because
the struggle is beautiful? Because the struggle itself is beautiful?

Connolly’s poetics is a tug of war between opposing drives: a yearning for perpetual motion—he’s fond of the Latin saying solvitur ambulando, “it is solved by walking”—and the temptations of denial and self-sabotage: “Fuck always follow your heart, fuck / it wants what it wants, fuck that.” One unforgettable poem written “in collaboration with notes app on phone left unlocked in bag” mashes up urban pastoral with button-mashing gobbledygook: “such a bexxI zzxxeautiful tree outside your bathroo xz za x / xdcm window.” A serendipitous flight from well-worn cycles, it’s a poem only Connolly, in cahoots with chaos, could have written.