Poetry in Penance: Hugh Blanton Reviews Adrian Sobol's Hair Shirt
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Adrian Sobol's second collection of poetry, Hair Shirt, is an energetic book, full of panache and pizzazz and without the frippery often found in the sophomore books of younger poets. Sobol chews up a lot of territory here—we go from seas, to mouths, to animals of varied stripe: a donkey, wiener dog, the worlds smartest horse (named Gorgeous Allegheny Slim), two singing cows, and a bear that can sign its name in beautiful cursive. There doesn't seem to be anything that Sobol won't turn into a poem, which is of course a virtue and a vice. There's a lot of free verse here and some prose poems, but he smuggles in some subtle rhymes from time to time:
I'm living on my own
hunger
built from
the last of my flesh
this is mine
I said
snatching
bread
from
my guests
The collection's energy is reminiscent of Jon Sands's second collection It's Not Magic where even poem titles carry their share of the load—Sands has "Moons Over My Hammy," Sobol gives us one here "High Impact Donkey."
Sobol's poems have a hard time settling into a style. If it weren't for his voice, you'd sometimes wonder if these poems were all written by the same poet. They elude categorization, hybridizing poetry and prose, fantasy and reality. He creates evocative images without being an Imagist, but there are a few poems here Marianne Moore would definitely give a vigorous nod of approval to. Melancholy has been done to death in poetry, the poets who indulge it give us lines that come off as not much more than whining or grumbling. Sobol never indulges, giving us flowing, comprehending lines: "There remains no law/ against our melancholy. So much light,/ I said in my closing argument, will go out before it's finally/ dark."
The thing about Chicago poets is that they never let you forget they're Chicago poets. From Carl Sandburg then to Nate Marshall now they act like boasting tour guides as if being a Chicagoan is some kind of vaunted privilege. Sobol grew up in Chicago (his family immigrated from Poland in the early 90's) but doesn't natter on about Chicago, and in fact doesn't even mention it a single time in this collection. There are some traces of The City of Big Shoulders muscularity in here: "If you were an appliance, I'd keep you plugged in. Maybe run my lips across the socket until it told me to stop." but for the most part Hair Shirt is the introspection of a writer with a vivid inner life. It's not a tour de force, but a tour de scrappy romp.
Sobol's debut poetry collection, The Life of the Party is Harder to Find Until You're the Last One Around was written "under the influence of immense Catholic guilt." Of course, a hair shirt is what monks and ascetics wear as a penance, and I can't help but wonder if Sobol thinks he needs a hair shirt because he isn't as austere and gloomy as his many Catholic predecessors (Gerard Manley Hopkins comes to mind first). Sobol's prose poems are heavily influenced by Noah Eli Gordon (Gordon's 2007 book Novel Pictorial Noise was selected by John Ashberry for the National Poetry Series, and, yes, Sobol has inherited a little of Ashberry's weirdness, too). In Sobol's prose poem "law of conservation" someone crashed into a Miata on the way to a wedding: "At the reception the priest shouts your name. This is for my Mazda Miata, he says before shooting you six times. You Barely feel it. The bullets pass through you like light through an hourglass. When the maid of honor finds you bleeding out near the cake, she offers you a glass of water. You ask for champagne. The tearful bride hands you her bouquet. This is for you, she says, and places a flower into each of your bulletholes." Sobol has taken a tango and turned it into a clog dance of prose.
Sometimes Sobol gets lost in the thickets of his imaginings, a horse (there's those animals again!) performs mathematics by stamping a man to death:
After completing
his multiplication tables,
we were justifiably
impressed (a polite round
of applause paired
with our son's
threadbare whistle).
Those lines are a touch of Ashberry, but where Ashberry can be formidable, Sobol is endearing, even with his near fanatical preoccupation with animals.
Sobol's the editor in chief of Kicking Your Ass magazine, a magazine of poetry with a—you guessed it—donkey image on the masthead. (It's wearing cool Biden-like aviators.) Their mission statement says that too few poems "tell us what it's like to push on a door marked pull or how to deal with sitting next to a rude grizzly bear in a restaurant." He obviously takes a different view to animals than did Whitman, and I don't think he's referring to Delmore Schwartz's metaphorical bear here, either. Sobol himself is an avid submitter of poetry to magazines, more than a dozen poems in this collection have made previous appearances in various journals. "Torch Song," a ten page prose poem, previously appeared as a micro chapbook in 2017.
The charm of the poems (sometimes excessive) in Hair Shirt don't diminish their intelligence, even when Sobol is hopscotching through light verse like a fairy clutching a wiener dog to his chest. Almost half the poems in Hair Shirt use parentheses, they serve the purpose of runaway truck ramps on a downhill grade and it's necessary for the collection's sometimes ecstatic tenor. Sobol minds his syntax, he doesn't allow his poems to sink into modernist murky ambiguity. His superb confidence sometimes comes off as a snotty schoolboy—the poem "regicidal friends" is a prose poem shot through with its own virgules, the word salmagundi wiggles its way in in the first poem. The confidence and cocksureness doesn't undermine his sensitivity, though: "Have you heard? he tells me/ More men are dying/ in need of softness than thirst." Sobol's talent is still fully alive in this second book, but he's not housebroken enough to be a laureate. I hope he never is.
Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.
Hair Shirt by Adrian Sobol. Malarkey Books, 2025. 87 pp. $16.00 (paper)
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