Review of Adam Tavel's chapbook "Red Flag Up," by Barrett Warner

If Eastern Shore poet Adam Tavel writes like a drunk Irishman, then I wish every poet were Irish.

Tavel’s new chapbook Red Flag Up consists of epistolary poems written in smoke, fumes, screams, and Sharpies, on the insides of t-shirts, soup can labels, a crumpled installation guide for a Chicco car seat, and many other objects bound to daily life.

Who even writes letters anymore? Who even writes poetry? The inner and outer surfaces of Tavel’s day to day artifacts are the ideal tablets to record his zealous, romantic, exhilarating pathos. The result is both quotidian and other-worldly. Songs as letters? Tavel is perhaps the love child of Blake and Whitman, as if he were writing letters to poetry, to the impossibility of it in our hectic lives, which is exactly why the wanting of it hurts so good.