How To Maintain Eye Contact

In How to Maintain Eye Contact by Robert Wood Lynn, “the good earth” has ended or is ending. For the speaker wandering it, the world’s collapse empties its beginning: “In west Kendall, backed up against // the national park, I was sure the world was over. And three / miles in, that it hadn’t ever begun.” 

The chapbook’s reliable arrangement is lists, catalogs of the social and physical world and its disintegration, both slow and sudden. What is lost is always mundane—retainers, a twenty-dollar bill, and minor embarrassment; what remains is familiar—silence, kissing, and apologies. The title cheekily invokes instruction, but the poems tremulously deliberate the relief offered by social avoidance, whether withdrawing from loved ones—“the mercy of friends on the train pretending / not to see each other”—or strangers: “I met someone yesterday / who looked me in the eyes […] I lingered for a second but then I looked away. / I had to.” In the poem “After,” ash has “buried / everything alive” and the surviving people “have resolved to get it right / this time.” In that remade imagined world, guns are sworn off, as are emails. The ambition extends: 

instead of a gavel, the solemn theater 
of litigation will start with sixty seconds

of looking each other in the eyes without speaking
from a distance close enough to kiss.

A speculative capacity for maintaining eye contact epitomizes how catastrophe generates a new interdependence: “All the ice has broken and now there are / no strangers,” declares the speaker of “On Wednesday They Came on the News,” who observes that the planet 

is overheating and where I expected riots, a run 
on the grocery stores, and maybe roving bands
of thieves, I found instead just a bunch of my friends, 
seven billion of them. We all grew up on Earth 
together, back in the day, back when there was ice.