Identity crisis

Dean Rader’s ingenious new collection, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon; $17), is lyric poetry for the digital age. His subject is the self “entwined in society,” as an epigraph informs us, and Rader’s poems offer a timely comment on America and American culture, its dark history of omissions.

“We come to language the way we come/ to this life, which is to say confused/ and desperate,” writes Rader in “Self-Portrait at Easter.” He navigates this state of confusion while giving us a guide for how to read his varied portraits. Wikipedia is an unreliable source; it has 40 million articles in nearly 300 languages, but its entries are never finished, never confirmed as fact. And so Rader sees the self as fluid and circumspect, always evolving, open to edits, created by writer and reader alike.

In a conflicted series of “American Self-Portraits,” Rader proclaims the country’s desires: “You want my sandwich,/ hey get in line. This isn’t the army, but I’ll march./ I want your shoulder holster, I want your mouth of bullets.” Later he channels Neruda in a lyrical elegy to the American dream, our traditions of violence, racism, and fear: Raised in Oklahoma, Rader now lives in San Francisco, where he is a professor at the University of San Francisco. Splicing wordplay with cultural critique, he quips: “I heart the left in San Francisco,/ but I left my heart in Oklahoma.” With formal dexterity, Rader draws from diverse sources: Choose Your Own Adventure novels, Frog and Toad children’s books, the haiku of Basho. “SelfPortrait as Wikipedia Entry” keeps trying to untie “sorrow’s tiny knot,” revealing the self as it hides, emerges and ultimately seeks connection. In a final poem, “Self-Portrait: Postmortem,” the speaker longs to drift with the reader in a dark boat beyond time: “You sit beside me in the dark ride as the organ plays and our boat lifts and drops over/ the edge. We are so close, it is as if we have traveled the many distances solely for this.” Thus human intimacy becomes a balm for the wounds of our past, for our ongoing digital dislocation.

America, I do not call your name without hope not even when you lay your knife against my throat or lace my hands behind my back, the cuffs connecting us like two outlaws trying to escape history’s white horse, its heavy whip and a pistol shot in the ear.