Book Reviews: The Long Body That Connects Us All by Rich Marcello

For this post, I’m bringing you another review, this time for a writer whose prose I have reviewed before. You might remember Rich Marcello, author of The Beauty of the Fall whom I also interviewed for this blog. Today I’m going to be talking about his poetry collection, The Long Body That Connects Us All.

The Long Body That Connects Us All contains approximately sixty one-page poems, divided into three sections:

Part I – In the Coming

Part II – Yab Yum

Part III – Aether

As the Amazon blurb says, these poems mostly focus on how to be a good man. However, they are also about love, loss, family, fathers and sons, tradition and breaking tradition, and what it means to be a man for us versus what it meant for our ancestors. There’s a little something in this collection for everyone, although most especially for fathers, sons, husbands, and lovers.

I adored Marcello’s poetic prose in The Beauty of the Fall, a voice which he certainly maintains in his actual poetry as well. His poems have a unique…muted beauty, I would argue. Not to say that his work is not powerful because it is. Rather, I think that the effects can best be expressed with this stanza from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

That is exactly the feel I get from the poems in The Long Body That Connects Us All—not a quick bang but an echoing, haunting whimper. And yet, unlike the almost defeated tone of Eliot’s final lines, Marcello’s collection provides a more hopeful message to the reader. This message is best embodied in the poem “The Long Body” and the stanza which gives the collection its name:

Mostly may you accept the love

in each other and yourselves.

For it’s that gift that lets you see clearly

the long body that connects us all.

I appreciate Marcello’s ability to provide a positive message without over-saturating it with cheesy sentiment. Rather, he turns the feelings which loom over us all—guilt, regret, longing—into tools for showing the ways in which outdated gendered standards keep getting based on and how much better things can be if men embraced a new way of being a man: showing love and affection towards everyone, but most particularly their sons and lovers.

Particular elements in The Long Body That Connects Us All speak directly to men and their sons—the poem’s narrator building Legos with his son, trying to follow in his father’s footsteps as a provider, the “toughening up” of a son by his father, etc. And yet the magic of Marcello’s poems is that I did not feel at all excluded as a female reader.

My favorite poem in the collection has to be “Blue Gears” from Part I – In the Coming:

The blue gears took hold and

tried to turn me

like the others

into the sum of parts

 

The worker of power, of money

The father, the son, the ghost walker

The lover, the projection, the artist

 

And while those parts come and go like

tall waves, stage personas parading,

heroes or villains warring,

they’re not me

 

I’m a witness sitting in the big chair,

a student of mysteries,

striving to grind down

abundant but finite gear teeth,

not only for me,

but for all those lost in blue

What I like best about this poem is that, while it’s directed at men, I could still connect with it as a worker caught in the perpetually-cranking gears of society. The message that you are more than the sum of your parts is universal. I must admit that I also got a bit of amusement out of the symbolism in blue gears representing the blue collar class of workers. However, even if you are not a man or a blue collar worker in particular, the message about individuality and trying to break the working cycle should resonate with anyone.

Another favorite of mine is “Timeservers”, a poem about men having to maintain a certain façade when in public and then still obsess over that image when in private. Again, this poem speaks about men and the pressures which modern patriarchal society puts on them. Nevertheless, even women can relate to this issue. After all, we have been forced to maintain a specific public image as well.

Because they’re only about a page long each—around 74 pages overall—this collection can be a quick read. Nevertheless, I recommend taking your time with it. I actually suggest doing that with all poetry as you can miss out on hidden layers to the poems if you read through them too quickly. With The Long Body That Connects Us All, you’ll also want to take the time to make sure that you know all of the terms Marcello uses. In general, the poems utilize plain language. Still, I had to look up a few words such as “aether” and “cenotaph”.

All in all, I really enjoyed The Long Body That Connects Us All by Rich Marcello. It has echoes of The Beauty of the Fall, both in its poetic voice and its themes. I like Marcello’s prose a little more, but that’s probably just a personal bias since I usually prefer prose anyway. Men will find this collection both entertaining and enlightening, and every reader will find it endearing, beautiful, and timeless.

You can buy The Long Body That Connects Us All by Rich Marcello as an eBook and in print on Amazon. Also be sure to check out Marcello’s website and Instagram account.

Do you know of a book I should read? Want your work reviewed on this blog? E-mail me at thewritersscrapbin@gmail.com or message me on Fiverr and we can arrange something.