Zach Czaia's new poetry collection, Knucklehead, offers signposts, way stations, and commanding views along one person's journey toward enlightenment and compassion through living a fully human life, day by day. The eponymous knucklehead is a stumbler, with doubts, inadequacies, and regrets, but he is also endowed with plenty of humor and spirit, and he described the foibles of teaching, the tangle of emotions associated with marriage, and the fervent desire to live a life of simplicity, meaning, and conscience. Many of the poems draw on Biblical references that present challenges, but also offer comfort. The desire to understand, to measure up, to follow through, is a source of incessant struggle that brings tension and energy to every line.
In one long poem Czaia takes Dante as a guide, crying out to him as a man of faith but also a fellow-seeker. In another poem he revisits his own childhood years, longing for the kind of certitude that he felt in his older brother's pronouncements, even when they turned out to be wrong. The death of George Floyd, which took place a few blocks from Czaia's house, is occasion for another extended meditation on our moral obligations.
Over the course of the volume Czaia weaves a portrait of maturation. The language is lively, the tone is conversational, the thought is infused with both anguish and aspiration. As poet Deborah Keenan observes, Czaia invites us to live out that existential tension of being there, but not quite, of hidden yet visible grace, of being home yet exiled, for the sake of valuing the gift of thisness in everyone and in everything.
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