In the street of the blind…
After Sunstone
by Dustin Cole
St. Louis: Farthest Heaven, 2025
$15.00 / 9798990692527
Reviewed by Kelly Shepherd
*
Dustin Cole’s poetry collection After Sunstone includes everything from “rustic meditations to techno-noir hallucinations and much in between,” according to the book’s Postscript. I would recommend this book first and foremost to readers who appreciate the sparse lines and raw subject matter of Charles Bukowski, or Henry Rollins.
One major theme in this book, or one of the more significant threads that twists and turns throughout its pages, is an exploration of visual imagery, specifically poems about eyes and all kinds of seeing. Two of the poems are entitled “Eyepoem II” and “Eyepoem V”; there are numerous references to reflections, windows, and lenses. The artwork on the book’s front and back covers evoke a visit to the ophthalmologist’s office, with the circle of brightness surrounded by darkness, and the eye exam sheets with letters (and mysterious glyphs, on the front cover) that appear in various states of blurriness.
Furthermore, the epigraph on the copyright page quotes 1 Corinthians 13:12, the familiar Bible verse that begins “For now we see through a glass, darkly,” and the book’s Postscript confirms that visionary imagery is indeed a connective tissue that holds these poems together. One such optical image is found in the poem “Night Job.” In the poem, the speaker (that might be the poet himself) wishes for a peaceful place to work,
with no one around and
time to read or even write
in a little solitary place
on graveyard shift everything’s quiet
As an aside, I can certainly relate to the wish expressed here, for quieter and less distracting—and really, more human—employment! This seemingly simple poem expresses something that I think many people are feeling very deeply in these uncertain and accelerated times. When is it ever going to be enough? When can we just slow down and take a breath?
But I’ll return to this interesting image, which exemplifies the collection’s optical and visionary motifs. In the poet’s imagination he is working the night shift in a quiet hotel in the mountains, where he is:
watched over by an elk head
with incredible horns
lobby curving over
its glass eyes
This taxidermied elk is watching over the speaker, just as he watches over the front desk of the hotel, and the lobby itself is visible as a reflection in the eyes that are doing the (figurative) watching. The speaker can see the lobby, and the reflection of the lobby, with himself inside it, in those glass eyes. There are layers upon layers. I won’t read too much into this, or try to stretch it out into something that Cole may never have intended in the first place, but this particular image of the reflection in the elk’s glass eye is a clear echo of the book’s very first image, found in the front matter, which is from the classic 1975 YA novel Rumble Fish by S.E. Hinton: “He had strange eyes—they make me think of a two-way mirror. Like you could feel somebody on the other side watching you, but the only reflections you saw was your own.”
This quotation neatly sets up the first poem in the collection, a prose poem entitled “Mickey Rourke, cinematographer.” It specifically mentions the young Mickey Rourke, who starred in the 1983 film version of Rumble Fish, but it also serves as a second epigraph for the entire collection. The disorienting state of seeing one’s own reflection, in other words watching yourself, while knowing that you are also being watched by someone else, is a recurring image.
Another example is “Eyepoem II,” which depicts eyes painted on toenails, that watch people while they sleep:
ten cameras
they didn’t see us
they didn’t see our dreamlife
Of course, like the elk’s glass eyes in “Night Job,” these painted eyes, or figurative “cameras,” are not literally capable of sight. They’re metaphorical eyes, both seeing and not seeing. Despite all this ever-present surveillance—this panopticon—the speaker still maintains a sense of self, and an assurance of privacy, even if sometimes they can only be found in the world of dreaming. And that might be Cole’s central gambit: an attempt to preserve selfhood and independence while living in a surveillance state, a state which the back-cover notes describe as “global capital’s end of days.”
But while all that might sound admirable, maybe even positive, another major thread in this collection is its candid depiction of despair. Starting with the Author’s Note at the beginning of the book, where Cole (Notice, Run the Bead) expresses an inability or an unwillingness to even decide whether or not to relocate and go somewhere else (and I admit I found the Author’s Note a little confusing), there is a steady current of hopelessness and aimlessness that runs throughout these pages. And while Pollyanna may not be the patron saint of poetry, as the late Don Domanski reminded us (in “Poetry and the Sacred”), Cole’s downward-spiral approach might not be everyone’s cup of tea.
There are numerous portraits of the hard side of urban life here, poems that would have been called “gritty” before that word became a cliché. There’s even a Barfly reference, and isn’t Charles Bukowski the patron saint of grimy urban malaise and solo day-drinking? The speaker of “Potboiler” begins by saying they should “order Dexedrine / off the internet / and write a potboiler”—self-published works described in a later stanza as:
books full of psychics and camgirls
books full of bodybuilders and depraved cops
books full of sad line cooks and coked out grad students
According to an interview with the author, his inspirations while writing After Sunstone included Charles Olson (especially his “Projective Verse” essay), Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and Robert Duncan, but I would argue that Bukowski’s fingerprints in particular are visible everywhere in these poems. “Pylons,” where the speaker scatters pylons with his car, only to watch the road crew put them right again the next day, is reminiscent of the angst and boredom expressed as casual vandalism in the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, where Paul Newman’s character goes to prison for cutting the tops off of parking meters.
“Late Nite,” included in its entirety here, exemplifies what I see as a sense of hopelessness in many of these poems:
it’s one of those nights
when nothing is there
nothing is a thing
it can touch you
Cole’s lines are consistently pared-down and concise. And the personification of nothing here is intriguing—nothing is not nothing, after all, if it can touch you—but that doesn’t make it pleasant.
The speaker of “Summary” bumps into an old acquaintance at a liquor store, resulting in an awkward conversation that includes the compelling image “didn’t we two crawl / from the same spirit-infested muskeg / 20 years ago?” The poem ends with a confession I won’t share here (no spoilers) but suffice it to say, it’s exceedingly bleak. “Little Magpie,” one of After Sunstone’s longer poems, is a sort of landscape painting of the built and social environments. The titular young magpie, “dishevelled” and “alone on the bare belly of pavement”—another wonderful, visceral image—is an innocent bystander in this scene full of addicts and thieves, ugliness and prison tattoos. The poem’s speaker indulges in an ultra-violent daydream while in a McDonald’s restaurant, and although the victims of that daydream are criminals themselves, it’s difficult for me to know where my sympathies should lie. I’ll stick with the magpie.
While I may not be the ideal reader (that is, the target audience) for a book like this, I can certainly appreciate much of what Dustin Cole is doing here. I’ve heard the Beat Generation writers described as “working-class outsiders” in a scene that was dominated by academic and establishment poets, and I think Cole belongs in that category as well. I’m going to look for his novels, because this is a writer who will keep people guessing.
*
Kelly Shepherd’s third poetry collection, Dog and Moon, was published in spring 2025 by Oskana Poetry & Poetics. Insomnia Bird, his second, won the 2019 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. Kelly has written eight chapbooks, and he is a poetry editor for the environmental philosophy journal The Trumpeter. Originally from Smithers, BC, Kelly currently lives and teaches on Treaty 6 territory, in Edmonton. [Editor’s Note: Kelly previously reviewed Matt Rader’s Ghosthawk for BCR.]
*
The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” –E.M. Forster