Persons of Interest

WINNER OF THE 2021 WOLFSON PRESS CHAPBOOK PRIZE

Introduction by Nancy Botkin:
Steven Ostrowski’s speaker in Persons of Interest is unabashedly nostalgic, but these mournful, searing, and celebratory poems, while aiming for the heart, rise above sentimentality. The artists he admired growing up shook his world, challenged him, changed him, and ignited his own desire toward artistry. Bob Dylan’s lyrics blew his mind—“Wait, you can even say that?” he asks incredulously, and in the opening poem, “Skeleton Blood Memoir with Bob,” he says Dylan

Leaves tracks that harp in your blood.
Leaves you spastic balletic, moonful in your poems,
howl-round in the bedroom, a little lonely in the eye sockets

Ostrowski’s language throughout this book has a kind of gritty musicality which is fitting when paying tribute to musicians of the ’60s. In “Neil Young,” the description goes primal:

Low in the fade-out sky, the moon-eye
of a ghost opens and shuts. Down
from the canyon’s teeth comes an animal howl,

His passion for those he admires extends beyond music to artists like Willem de Kooning, Franz Wright, and Allen Ginsberg, those who made an impression as he moved into young adulthood and beyond. But, there are lesser, unsung heroes that crossed his path and played a role no less powerful: ex-lovers, friends, and even poetry itself. The poem “Wayward in the Blood” is an epistolary poem to his friend, Sull, in which he recalls a past life they shared during a care-free period when drugs, hitch-hiking, fishing, picking up girls—years of “lust, rebel and howl”—dictated an urgent agenda. Ostrowski reminds us that reveling in and relishing the past serves us in the present by reminding us of who we used to be and what we yearned to become. In “Ars Poetica” his budding talent is recognized after he recites his own poem to a class, and the teacher, a little stunned, asks him to read it again.

The phrase “persons of interest” conjures up images of law enforcement, investigations into possible suspects in criminal activity. The term carries sinister connotations, but in Ostrowski’s world, his persons illuminate, instruct, and impart gifts, and there are sure to be more of these riches forthcoming if luck—or art—has any say.

Reviews:

Persons of Interest’s passionate irreverence knocked me out. This raucous, insightful mélange of poems to the heroes and anti-heroes of Steven Ostrowski’s youth includes iconic musicians Mitchell, McCartney, Lennon, and especially Dylan, sharing space with a killer poem to painter de Kooning, and deft homages to Ginsberg and Wright, poets whose work Ostrowski particularly admired on his journey to discover his own, powerful, singular voice.
—Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Erotic: New & Selected; poetry editor, Cultural Daily

Halfway through Persons of Interest, we encounter the speaker as a student in Allen Ginsberg’s poetry class. Ginsberg’s students, “nervously fingering the contents of our bags / of untried linguistic yelps,” are told: “Illuminate me!” Ostrowski has taken that assignment to heart. These poems do illuminate, revealing the ways our past refracts into our present, the slim margins by which one’s destiny is decided, and especially the vulnerability of choosing to “love you even if you’ve murdered a starfish.” Large-heartedness infuses Ostrowski’s meditations, whether on “a young girl who / reminded me of Jesus, / the way she handed me my fish sandwich . . . / like our fingers were miracles” or the persona’s own students, who “walk downheaded / into a future that seemed to threaten like weather.” In today’s uncertain weather, Persons of Interest offers shelter, compassion, and light.
—Sarah P. Strong, author of Tour of the Breath Gallery and The Mouth of Earth