Review of Mike Krutel's "Best Poems," by Barrett Warner

Some are dreamers and some are architects. Mike Krutel’s debut chapbook Best Poems puts him squarely in the dreamer camp. I wish he had more company to keep the bed warm. Instead he has insomnia. “Tonight is the night of no sleep” he asserts in the first poem, “Best,” before using images to draw us inside: “Cannonballs over the playground. / The cat rubs a glass frame off the mantle.” We know the glass shatters, but Krutel doesn’t let us hear it. The insomnia is not about the noises.

The key moment in the poem is a release of information, rather than action: “I am holding these individually wrapped letters,” and what emerges is two people, one wanting to know and feel without “authorization,” and the other wanting to disassociate from a moment she’s nonetheless in charge of. As the speaker says, “I make swift turns in an ocean I am always made / to ride beneath.” He is in control of his own out-of-control state and usually that’s enough, but not if he wants to sleep.