**On For a Second, In the Dark by Alec Hershman**

by Tyler Truman Julian

For a Second, In the Dark, Alec Hershman’s prize-winning chapbook, looks at life with a keen eye, rooting out truth by emphasizing often overlooked details in the mundane. The word play and humor that previously drew me to Hershman’s poetry is on full display in For a Second, In the Dark, especially when the detail he chooses to focus on in an individual poem is held up to a warped or funhouse mirror. Hershman’s speaker adds a sometimes cynical or satirical voice to poems that are frequently tender and consistently human. In “Popular History,” Hershman’s speaker reflects on an alternate reality in which “Marilyn Monroe / is the president’s wife” and “birds there look much like ours.” This rewritten history is a type of wish fulfillment that ultimately explores the speaker’s own sense of what could have been:

            A bus comes as it comes to you,

            scooping up standers-by,
            that getting away as you know it,
            has not changed, not really. And now

            you’ll never know those gray-backed strangers
            boarding the two big steps
            in a gray light in which a smile

            like the beveled end of a dentist’s tool
            catches, in the foreground,
            the President’s face. Behind him

            lies something certain and unknown.
            Who, exactly, is he looking at,
            the smile widening, but not

            too wide, because one of us really was
            standing in the wings, and because
            the rest of the story was almost right.

The farce of Kennedy leaving Jackie for Marilyn further contextualizes the speaker’s own experience. There is loss playing out in the background of the word play and humor. There’s a critical lens held up to society and personal relationships.

“Popular History” is just one of many examples throughout For a Second, In the Dark in which the speaker moves in and out of dreamscapes to comment on genuine relationships. “In my waking life, / I’m a spy for the previous one,” he explains in “Eating Bread Is Wooden Ships Crashing on the Shore.” Hershman engages in a sort of metacommentary here, exploring how a poet can truthfully relay the deeper meaning behind familiar images. In what reads as an ars poetic moment, the speaker describes an urban center and declares,

            Because this is not my town,
            or not my town
            any longer, I divulge
            private information to the eyes,
            a little knowledge to my mouth:
            I whistle, see
            there is a crystal basket
            domed perfectly
            over the fire hydrant, a pipe
            inferable, liquid clapper
            in the center of a bell.

…

            I know things the locals don’t
            and take them with me:
            there are stellar grapes
            marooned in the gutters,
            and cats no pedestrian will ever
            brush upon by ankles. As I pass,
            the smoke comes easily
            out of the restaurants.

A memento can be this book of matches.

My hands, when I’m not watching,
are too big for my pockets.

(“Deja Vu”)

Hershman’s attention to detail and humor point to deeper truths than the surface-level scenes may initially suggest, creating complex depth across a very short chapbook. His speaker zooms in and out, choosing which details to focus on, giving them center stage—and emotional weight. In its closing poem, For a Second, In the Dark, returns to a dream in which the speaker can fly. In “As Far as Hawks Go,” the speaker offers insight into this zoomed out-zoomed in, cinematic approach to human experience, explaining,

And though I lost some detail
to elevated vision, my new life was still

extravagant and terse, like a billboard facing the sea.

Hershman’s attention to the mundane is far from simple. For a Second, In the Dark is a humorous exploration of life that stings with the bite of satire. It’s a sharp look at the absurdity of our daily existence. By paying attention, spying, like Hershman’s speaker, we may also arrive at an “elevated vision” of this life.

In case you missed it—here is Hershman’s poem from The Shore:
Ars Poetica