In a stressful and dangerous time, Mark Laba makes sense of our world through visuals that penetrate right into our imagination. “Maybe you don’t see these things/ the same way as me” he declares in the first poem of his collection, The Inflatable Life. This line stays true through the work as his oddball POV comes to define the disparity between his visualization and the reader’s own interpretation. At times, he lays out these paradoxical situations that compel me to envision scenarios and concepts that are out of this world. And then to counter this, there are moments when his scenes lack this accessibility. Laba even provides hand-drawn pictures to explain, and during those poems, they are desperately needed.

That’s not a knock on how The Inflatable Life conducts itself; there are some lines that procure a picture that creates new neural networks with surprising ease. Descriptions such as “a kidney stone/ set against a gorgeous sunset” or a man and his parrot laying “beneath the wreckage of charred bodies that/ children are told the storks brought” bring to light evocative images that keep me reading. Laba uses his wordplay to represent our complicated world. Each level of beauty contains a layer of trauma that can’t be reconciled so easily. The poet muddies his work with a grimy underside that contradicts lines of tenderness and bliss. My brain jumped through hoops from the edges of my skull, giving me a minor concussion in the process, just imagining these things. In a good way though.   

 I loved most of his wordplay, and how Laba presents a chaotic world in simple expressions. This is a work that excites during a time where most of my life is stuck at home. His poems, even the bad ones, always bring something to the table. Laba defies our world’s rules, and this is a refreshing collection that allows readers to escape the confines we all find ourselves stuck in. When the only time away from my desk is getting groceries, the releasing of my mind is a necessity. The Inflatable Life makes this as easy as streaming How I Met Your Mother.

 As I said earlier, there are some moments where the descriptions strictly fail to cooperate with my imagination. Laba’s surreal vision sometimes lacks the artistry that he, as a poet, has shown he can perform with insane skill.  Still in the initial poems, his line “like a billiard ball refusing to bathe” doesn’t create the slightest tick in my head. I can’t even write what I see because there is nothing to see. It’s only alliteration, and not even the fun kind. Lines like these are dense and unresponsive which is inconsistent with the rest of his work. Laba’s poems are hot and cold, nuclear bomb to ice age, and sometimes the dullness blurs the astonishment.

But maybe, in the current state of the world, that’s what we need. There are good moments, scenes of breathtaking proportion, but with these, the bad lurks its head to taint it. Laba appears to unintentionally achieve this, but with an entertaining zeal that only oddballs can do. As he describes, “It takes three ingredients/ to make a perfect beef stew:/ beef, potatoes and jaundice.” We can all see the jaundice, but damn is that beef good.