Lungs by Chris Bullard

Chris Bullard gives full rein to his wit and pathos in Lungs, a collection of meditations on time, mortality, and the vagaries of the self. As he writes in “Day of the Dead,” “I’d buried my past selves in desert graves/where authorities wouldn’t look. /Now they’ve returned dressed in my clothes.” Bullard’s voice is deadpan, ironic, erudite, playfully, archly, and sometimes seriously morbid, not to mention amazing.

 The prime mover of these lively poems is death. Chris Bullard knows exactly how to make a reader squirm, casting doctors and nurses as predators, turning the dead loose from their crypts, reminding us that life is a hopeless gamble because the house wins every time. Not even living “as our own best selfie” can protect us indefinitely from random lightning strikes, break-ins, or adverse health events. Bullard’s poems circle closer and closer to an inescapable black hole, plunging us into it with the startling specificity of the final poem.