A Poetry Collection About the Human Consciousness, Both Candid and Captivating

By Philip Gaber
Amazon Digital Services, 184 pages, $9.99

In an extremely esoteric and sincere collection, Philip Gaber writes with an abundance of insight for readers everywhere. His poems read like anecdotal reports about the human being in a fixed notion of tension. While so much of the poetic trajectory is critical of existence and worthy of communicating the urgency of our time, the morbid and grimness of this all is redundant and formulaic. The simple and general materializations of anger, resignation, anxiety, and paranoia are vague and too matter-of-fact in some selections, which allows little depth and resonation beyond the heavy verbatim of self-analysis.

However, there are still solid pieces that are spot-on with inner monologues, from which the poet coins a lyrical reality like “It’s about not extending myself. It’s about…being too involved in my own head” (from my own weight) and  “happiness is a fickle mistress who sometimes likes to falsely accuse you of communicating threats” (the bright coming morn). Though, at times, the usual abstractions of chaos and disorder weaken the poetic design and dialogue with such rigidity, Gaber’s enthusiastic approach to the various levels of perception is idiosyncratic and heartfelt: “the ridiculous is just a matter of ejaculating the awkward parts and rejuvenating the Soul as we know it to be or not to be” (a construct, a fallacy, a lie) and solely, “’Bein’ human really hurts sometime…’” (our absence from life).

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