Somebody Else Sold the World

How poetry might make sense of the COVID-19 crisis is a core quandary thoughtfully explored by Adrian Matejka in his fifth collection Somebody Else Sold the World. Borrowing its title from David Bowie, this collection explores who might be implicated in the ambiguous figure of “somebody else.” The title repeats throughout the collection like a musical refrain, a deferral—perhaps—of blame and guilt, an admission that it is hard to neatly divide our world into antagonists and protagonists.

With tenderness and intimacy, Somebody Else Sold the World  highlights what has been lost, what might be recoverable, in these “wrong-noted” days. Occasionally, the switching of scales between the personal and the political does not quite hit the mark, and one feels that lines like “the antagonists boat out / to their islands of isolation // & repose” could be sharper. But what Matejka gets fascinatingly right is how the speakers in Somebody Else Sold the World balance anxieties of care against nostalgia and just how aware they are of feeling lost within the present, of being out-of-time. Such wishful naivete in the face of the pandemic, the desire to return to an “older time,” with a clear sense of a before and an after, is symptomatic of the entropic chaos of our present. As one speaker wistfully muses in a standout sequence of poems that reimagines alternative futures for the materials that make up a bullet, “In some other life, / the primer probably would have gone in another direction.”

Matejka’s command of melody and prosody is striking, especially in combination with the offbeat moments of humor and surrealism that strengthen the collection. What results is a kind of song that captures both lightness and heaviness of the current moment. Refusing the appeal of an uncomplicated cathartic release, Somebody Else insists on vulnerability, on admitting what has gone wrong, while acknowledging the difficulties in wrestling with “what comes after” the selling of our world.