In college we read “Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem,” and it stuck with me the past six years. I finally looked up who wrote it and found this book, which I loved a lot.

We read this book in our poetry club & wrote letters to friends & the dead inspired by the book. Funny & accessible & full of feeling! And the politics of the poems are really well integrated.

So many good poems. Not a bad one in the bunch, and many I want to hoard as treasure.

Olzmann manages to intertwine the ordinary and mundane with personal anxieties and frustrations, social commentary, and philosophical ponderings, all with a few, simple words. So many associative connections so beautifully expressed.

I want to share them all with you.

There's a lot I really like about this collection, and it frustrated me precisely because it had so much going for it. First off, I love the central conceit. Several of the best poems (including the spectacular final piece) revolve around terms from the postal service. Several others take the form of letters to and from personal acquaintances of the poet, literary figures, animals, objects, etc. Those ones, I'm sorry to say, often felt too cutesy for me. But it's all tied together thoughtfully into a theme of climate and political despair. The letters are a dying form of human connection, built to be physical and lasting but destined to be forgotten. There are great ideas here, and enough great individual poems to make up a stunning chapbook.

But overall, I wish these poems did less telling and more exploring. Some of the political pieces read more like impassioned, well-written Twitter threads than poems. When a poem explores ambivalence or uncertainty, it tends to telegraph that too clearly, often in the form of a direct question. Metaphors are often explained explicitly, and the endings of the poems sometimes feel like summaries. The voice, typical of Olzmann, is conversational, breezy, and playful, which makes for a quick read. There's a constant attempt to inject dark humor into even darker material. Sometimes that works beautifully, but it just as often scans as semi-ironic detachment, and it quickly becomes predictable and tiresome.

It sounds like I disliked "Constellation Route," but I really didn't. It's full of wit, imagination, and righteous anger. I'm just a little disappointed in the direct, heavy-handed application of its ideas. These poems, enjoyable and clever as they often are, aren't really built to come back to over and over again. I really love poetry with layers and mysteries to uncover, and this book says what it means too clearly for my taste. Still a fan of Olzmann, though, and always interested in his work.