I think I am in love. With the voice of these pieces. 

Maybe it is familiarity. 

Or perhaps, egocentricity, wit, humor, candidness. Yes, familiarity. 

In two sessions, I read through the first part of “Selfwolf”, sitting at my usual table at Erie Curry House, sipping on chai and eating mulligatawny soup with rice, listening to the owner yell on the phone about how DoorDash fucked up his restaurant’s hours and he was losing customers, watching the lights malfunction on the Walgreens sign across the street, marveling at how much I related to some of the concepts Mark Halliday writes about and how much I disagreed with others. 

But the voices in these poems are just a little too realistic. 

My primary goal, when I started to read, was to figure out what the title means. I still have yet to do that. But that is fine. I have more important things to discuss. 

Out of all the poetry I have ever read, Halliday’s is the most enthralling. I think it is because the voices he writes with feel so familiar. In some, I see a part of myself. A part that I can critique in his characters without correcting in myself. Not a particular trait or something I can label. Just a feeling. Or a lot of feelings sometimes.

I think the poem that resonated with me the most in the first part was “Removal Service Request”. It hit home in a big way. I cannot tell you the amount of times I’ve wanted to rip my room to shreds and throw out old photos and paintings and books that reminded me of times long past, people long gone, and emotions still haunting me that I deeply wanted to forget. But I do not. I cannot. 

Continuing on, in the second part of the book, there is a sense of sarcasm embedded: Halliday trying to get us to realize that if he wrote any other way, we would not be nearly captivated enough. At the same time, I think he also acknowledges that irrespective of our feelings, he is simply not going to give in to whatever traditional ways of writing poetry exist. His voice is more important. 

Halliday owes no patience to works that try too hard and neither do I. What I love most about his poems are that they are casual and honest yet beautiful all the same. They float in a selfishness combined with self-awareness that only so few choose to embrace. Too few, perhaps. 

Even in the third part of the book, which seems to partially juxtapose the other two in that it brings an awareness of other people in ways that the other sections lacked, Halliday keeps reminding the reader of the first-person speaker, letting them know that this is the reference point for all the other voices. He does well to acknowledge the downfalls of trying to acknowledge other perspectives because at the end of the day, no matter how much we try, the only perspective we can ever truly understand is our own.

Particularly, from the third part, I appreciate “Bad People” because it displays exactly how misconstrued our individual perspectives can be, as we go about our day not knowing an entire other side of a story, being presented with limited details and having to fill in the blanks. But bringing in the little kid at the end of the poem to ask “Bad? How come?” also reminds the reader that people do not start out in limited bubbles of existence. We start out rather innocent and curious and willing to ask the right questions. The world ruins us. We are raised in certain circumstances, plied with certain beliefs and opinions about the world, and at a certain point, we stop asking those important questions. 

But perhaps my favorite two poems from this section were “Pages” and “Other Pages”. The line “SAVE SELF LET OTHERS FALL” caught my attention. As much as we would, I am sure, like to deny it, is this not exactly what every page of our existence is shrouded in. Those who decide to supposedly be ‘selfless’, how selfless are they really? They have their own motivations for acting in accord with the desires of someone else instead of their own. Unless we are being forced or tricked, I don’t think any decision we ever make is devoid of autonomy, of selfishness, of egocentricity. 

Ha! Kant.