Now You Are a Missing Person: A Memoir in Poems, Stories, & Fragments Moontide Press (May 2023) 162 pages

At first, reading Now You Are a Missing Person by Susan Hayden brought me back to my twenties when I was living in Long Beach, California and reading Stand Up poetry and fiction by writers like Joan Jobe Smith and Gerald Locklin almost exclusively. The book’s opening poetry has that kind of feel, complex work that a reader might understand on one level at once but upon reflection has greater complexity than one would expect. Also, it treats those events and emotions that other poets might not discuss because they are considered too ordinary, with the complexity that they deserve. I enjoyed the first half of the book thoroughly because I appreciate a writer who can unpack life in this way. As the book proceeds, however, Hayden moves beautifully beyond the frustrations and joys of being a young person to dealing with tragedy and loss. What Hayden does most beautifully, most subtly in the book, however, is demonstrate how joy and loss are all one thing, how the consciousness of future and past loss adds an edge and meaning to current joys; without explaining the concept, she demonstrates throughout the collection the importance of finding joy and living in the present.

The collection opens with a series of poems and short stories about the difficulty of feeling like an outsider, which is an emotion most poets, writers, and readers will understand and relate to all too well. She grew up in the 1970s in Los Angeles searching for herself and a spirituality while trying to understand what it meant to be Jewish. Unless the readers are Jewish, they do not have access to the special isolation that Jewish people feel: however, most of us have felt like spiritual outsiders in the same way that she does and have found a connection to a larger sense of community and religious awakening through the arts, especially music. For her, it began with an appreciation of the Grateful Dead.

He opened his wallet, showed me a picture
with his arm around [Jerry] Garcia.
God wasn’t supposed to have a missing finger
and tour internationally. [26]

Later that night, “We all joined hands, formed a prayer circle” (26). Like so many young people she feels the need to break away from the traditions she grew up with and find something that is her own. Like all great Stand Up poets, Hayden allows us to see the tip of Hemingway’s iceberg and infer and experience these moments for ourselves through her work. What she finds is acceptance and love, what she feels that religion should be concerned with: “It’s just like Woodstock here: six thousand Deadheads and no hate, no judgment. In the psychedelic church, everyone is smiling” (29). As she grows, she is able to fuse these two sides of her religious life as she is able to see the context of her relationships and her life in general. What Hayden is doing in this section of the collection is to give us a glimpse into the interior life of a person in all its complexities, and she does so skillfully and in a way that develops a feeling that what she is dealing with is widespread if not universal.

As the collection continues, Hayden discusses the idea of loss as she loses her father and her husband, and the poetry becomes richer, perhaps more deeply felt; she is less concerned with the mission of the Stand Up poet, which is to have multiple levels of meaning, and more interested in simply relating the emotional reality of grief. For example, she writes about her son’s loss in “Boys without Fathers” and her anxiety about whether she is going to be able to raise him well:

They learned their way 
around things, 
not by choice 
They’ve given voice 
and reason 
to my tiny leaps 
toward the Unknown 

And I was (and still am) 
prone, 
susceptible 
to their lack of guidance—
that moral (or immoral) code 
invented 
by being let loose 
to draw conclusions 
of their own. [117] 

It is this section of the collection that moves me the most. It is deeply felt, and the anxieties she feels, along with the pain, are so clearly drawn, so real. In “Reframing,” she discusses how she has reframed her relationship with those who have died.

This is my narrative, a shelter of sentences
to magnify the gulf between us
where the truth must lie. [128]

The truth that she speaks of here, in part, is that there is now the greatest gulf possible between her and those she has lost, and though she loves these people, that closeness will always be gone. This is the truth of the loss of all loved ones of course, and that is the point. She is exposing us to the concept of loss, hers and ultimately ours.

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the collection, however, is how Hayden demonstrates the importance of finding joy in the present, and how that joy is strengthened by the knowledge that pain waits for all of us. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in “Paris 2003,” where she writes about her experiences with her husband in Paris.

The Boulevard glows with our footprints 
stable and so slippery. 
Walking on ice has never been this easy. 
Hang on. 
Witness. Heartbeat. Godsend. 
Any minute, this could end. [105]

The next poem and series of poems are about the pain of losing her husband in a skiing accident. For me, this idea is at the heart of the collection. There is pain, but there is the joy of discovery and understanding who she is. There is the joy of being there with another person. For me, never has a second reading of a collection been so valuable and meaningful. In the second reading, the poems were tinged with this pain. The first reading was full of great discovery; the second reading was full of greater meaning.

Now You Are a Missing Person is an exceptional collection. The title refers to her husband’s death. He was missing for a time after a tragic skiing excursion. However, more importantly, it refers to her, and the way that tragedy and grief made her feel. In a sense, she lost herself after her losses, and this reality is true of anyone who loses. We must rediscover ourselves after we lose those who are close to us. This book is an investigation of that process, but I think also part of the process for the author.

John Brantingham

was the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (east of Fresno, CA), and now lives in Jamestown, New York. He is the founding editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder, and the author of 21 books of poetry, memoir, and fiction including his latest, Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press, 2020) and Kitkitdizzi (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022), the latter a collaboration which features artworks by his wife, Ann Brantingham.

John’s poems, stories, and essays are published in hundreds of magazines and journals. His work has appeared on Garrison Keillor’s daily show, The Writer’s Almanac; has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize; and was selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions anthology series for 2022 and 2016.

Author’s website: www.johnbrantingham.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A Walk Among Giants by Kendall Johnson, a review of John and Ann Brantingham’s book Kitkitdizzi: A Non-Linear Memoir of the High Sierra, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 16, January 2023)

⚡ Finnegan’s (Fiancée Goes McArthur Park on His Birthday) Cake, flash fiction by Brantingham in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 9, August 2021), which was subsequently selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions 2022 anthology

⚡ Objects of Curiosity, a collection of his ekphrastic poems (Sasse Museum of Art, 2020)

⚡ For the Deer, one of two haibun by Brantingham in KYSO Flash (Issue 8, August 2017)

⚡ Four prose poems in Serving House Journal (Issue 7, Spring 2013), including A Man Stepping Into a River and Poem to the Child Who I Almost Adopted