Review: Owen McLeod
On Owen McLeod’s Dream Kitchen
by Tyler Truman Julian
Dream Kitchen by Owen McLeod is a surreal look into the middle of America and into the middle of the human heart. In many ways, I am at a loss for how to approach these moving, challenging, contemplative, and hilarious poems beyond individual adjectives. This is intentional. McLeod’s Dream Kitchen embodies what may be called a modern middle-American surrealism. This book claws into the heart of America, our consumerism, our self-interest, our troubled relationship to the self, and pulls it out, still beating. In this strange heart, torn between the past and a present, Plato lives comfortably next to John Berryman, and they are both sitting in La-Z-Boy recliners eating Cheetos. This image isn’t an exact reproduction, but it isn’t far off from what McLeod paints throughout the collection as it wrestles with what middle America, with its Facebook moms and carpool lanes, swing state politics and suburbs, has come to represent.
Complicated and often humorous settings surround McLeod’s speaker as he walks through the world philosophizing, setting the stage for meaningful self-appraisal. In “Someone Just Searched for You,” McLeod’s speaker highlights the perverse voyeurism of our love affair with social media (which represents so much of our jealous, nostalgic, and confused current reality) and warps it until the only person left in scene is the speaker seeking notice. The individual crying out from this crowded, strip mall “wilderness” becomes a profound critique of our present moment. He writes,
Whatever they found, it wasn’t me. Strange,
since I’m not hiding anywhere. I’m right here
at Supercuts, across the street from Applebee’s
watching a toddler fumble with the house
he fished from the second-hand toys stashed
in a laundry basket near the door.
The speaker seems to not only seek notice, but relish in the reality that the aforementioned technology cannot capture him, that he has some sort of knowledge others lack. Social media only catches so much of a person, and McLeod is interested in parsing out the real from the mask, the disreality presented to the world and forced on individuals by it. He continues,
Still can’t find me? I’m inside the house,
seated at a miniature piano. I stumble
over a sonata, then stop and stare dumbly
at the keys. I remember a box of old letters
in the attic, too poignant to read, too precious
to burn. I remember cave paintings, amulets
of bone, dead leaves eddying on the back porch,
my failure to capture the thisness of things.
I open the piano lid and crawl inside.
If they search long enough, they’ll find me.
(“Someone Just Searched for You”)
This is a troubled speaker. He wants to be found, recognized, but he doesn’t yet seem to know his true self. He has failed to capture the thisness of his own life and hides behind humor and image, inviting the reader to seek out who he is alongside him.
This search takes the reader on a journey that wants so badly to mirror that of the characters in Plato’s parables, the heroes of The Bible, and the speaker of Aristotle’s treatises. However, McLeod’s speaker exists somewhere around Ohio in the 21st century. The distractions of our modern world interrupts and challenges the speaker’s search for what it means to be human. It is for this reason the surreal erupts across the pages of the collection. Humanity is strange, and the speaker seems to wonder if it is stranger than ever before, given the state of the world around him. But it is in this rupture, this strangeness, that McLeod reveals his deepest ideas about humanity. Through his speaker’s search, it becomes clear that humanity is as flawed as ever, but no worse that it’s always been. Amid the chaos, the search is what matters in “the grander scheme whose end we hope is love,” and he tells us that if we cannot comprehend the world (just as our past philosophical giants could not in their own lifetimes), then the goal must be “at least to sing / in tune with the becoming that has always been” (“Carousel (a mirrorform)”). This failure to comprehend is not new, McLeod tells us, and in this common understanding of humanity, McLeod’s speaker finds himself. Perhaps this understanding will change and shift with time, but maybe that is the point. Even as the world spirals out of control and nothing seems to matter, McLeod leaves us with an important command: “know below the nothing, the thing that counts” (“The Same Bare Place (a mirrorform)”). What counts is the innate humanness of the search, the mundane moments of stability in an individuals complicated life. These things can’t be captured in a Tweet or Facebook post, but they build into something of real consequence at the end of the day.