Vital Truths: Review

Vital Truths

Fomite Investigations, A Series of Tracts for Our Time

I am absurdly fond of little books – a category in which I include physically tiny books, books with small print runs, one-of-a-kind art books, pamphlets addressing particular issues through the art of the colorful exhortation essay, or less-than-a-chapbook tracts of poetry that fit together like facets of a gem. 

Vital Truths, the latest Fomite Investigations Tract from Fomite Press (a self-described “post-capitalist operation”) of Burlington, Vermont, is precisely the latter. Sitting neatly in the hand at 8”X4” and a mere 25 pages in length, Vital Truths, contains selections from five Vermont poets – Dave Cavanaugh, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Marjorie Maddox, Tony Magistrale, and Sharon Webster – distilled and concentrated down to the essence of a potent elixir, a sort of cider-vinegar reduction for the soul.

Each poem provides the impetus for reflection on issues of critical importance here and now. Tony Magistrale depicts “the ceaseless cacophony of American business” in Heads Down, while Marjorie Maddox’s Ephiphany, in speaking of the January 6, 2021 invasion of the White House, includes these epiphanic lines:

...Instead, our kin

or neighbors storm the halls. We recognize

their faces, tense with hate. In different form

they like a bit like us. ...

.

.

.

This is the hard epiphany we fear:

the ones we loath and love might be the same.

Sharon Webster transforms our uncertainty and fragility into imagistic lyricism in Living Here:

The trees are jet black

roots in reverse,

still as statues.

.

.

.

When we stop walking

they flood the sky with grief.

Gail Holst-Warhaft addresses the war on Gaza with a frank, deep gaze in Olives:

In the dark that is Gaza, if anything survives,

it will be the olive trees that can manage

without water for a year or two.

Dave Cavanaugh closely observes a homeless man on the street holding a Blue Plastic Radio:

No tiny tune from it, no wild rhythm.

No sound at all from the radio

he holds onto like everyting

he may have once imagined,

Vital Truths is a small collection of such treasures, like the gems from a walk in the woods tucked into a box in your desk drawer, to be taken out and held time and again. The tract is available from Fomite Press at https://www.fomitepress.com/tracts2.html, or order it through Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury, https://vermontbookshop.com/, or from your favorite independent bookshop.