NEVERWELL by DARREN C. DEMAREE coming soon from Small Harbor Publishing (2023)

A car skids / onto our / front lawn / & I rush out / to make sure / I’m not in it. 

-Darren C. Demaree

Every once in a while, you pick up a poetry book that’s exactly what you’ve been waiting for, exactly what you’ve been needing. So much poetry glorifies alcohol. 100,000 poets have tried to be Charles Bukowski and died deaths of despair in the process (6 people die a day from alcohol in my state of New Mexico, and this excludes drunk driving). When I was in graduate school for poetry, one of my peers had a poster on his wall that said “write drunk, revise sober”. I know for 30 years when I wrote poetry I had a glass of bourbon if I was lucky, and a beer if I was broke next to me as I wrote — I thought I was Bukowski. Glorifying alcohol is far too common among men and women “of letters”. This reliance on alcohol comes from a place of weakness in the face of demons. We want to “take the edge off” instead of realizing that the edge is a gift. “The edge” is our minds telling us what needs fixing so we can grow as humans, instead of wallowing in the calcified thinking of the sodden. I don’t think every single person that drinks alcohol is an alcoholic because that would be a cognitive distortion; however, I think in this country it’s far too easy to ramp up drinking, ounce by ounce, year by year, without even thinking because it’s the American way. Many of us are not strong enough to avoid all the temptation which comes at us from every angle: the thimbles full of wine served in church, the happy hour with your coworkers, the poetry open mic at the winery, the booze advertisements on TV during the Super Bowl and every other program, the booze advertisements on your streaming service during the commercial breaks during Yellowstone in which the characters are all drinking, drinking, drinking with no cirrhosis of the liver. Where is the camera on the six dying in my state every day from alcohol? Who is telling those stories? Nobody. Nobody but the nurses and doctors and morticians and surviving family members who have to look at that bloated, yellow death. They tell those stories as they pour themselves a drink after a long shift “to take the edge off”.

Prolific Ohio poet Darren C. Demaree has written a brave poetry sequence about recovery from alcohol. It’s called NEVERWELL and it’s coming soon from Small Harbor Publishing. When I started reading this collection, I could not put it down because I have been sober for three years and I know what it takes to write sober poems after decades of alcohol abuse. Being a poetry publisher and avid reader of poetry, I also know how rare this type of verse is in the American poetry scene. There’s so much honesty in Demaree’s work, yet there’s no preaching. This is something I struggle with as a poet, yet Demaree handles it so deftly. One way he does this is by repeating several times in the book that the speaker “will drink again”. Acknowledging that alcohol addiction is bigger than any of us, and that we can never let our guard down to that part of us that wants to take the easy way out, keeps this collection grounded and inviting. Yet this “easy way out” is examined in this collection, over and over, in subtle ways. This book is gracefully self deprecating. This speaker discusses what it felt like in his heart after urinating on his wife’s expensive sheets in a drunken sleep. This speaker discusses what it’s like when their toddler brought them a beer from “the room-temperature cardboard box.” Bukowski would’ve stopped there, but this poet does not. This poet adds, “The wreck- / age, the infinite re- / play of wreckage / that still wakes / me…” when this image is brought up in the speaker.  The poems in this collection go fast, and their pleasures are subtle but powerful. 

This poetry collection that deals with alcohol recovery is not about Alcoholics Anonymous or joining a church or finding religion. In fact, some of my favorite lines go in opposite directions, such as, “There are only / so many words / I have left / before I drink / again. I do not / propose to waste / any of them / on a prayer.” Big Alcohol wants us to believe that if you can’t “drink responsibly”, then you are a poor alcoholic who needs to immediately go to AA and something must be wrong with you since you can’t correctly pick your poison. All that’s, of course, a cognitive distortion. So many of us are now finding the truth about our own addictions, and our own capacity to heal ourselves in ways beyond the traditional models. Therapists all around this country are helping people with alcohol addiction, and some poets are writing their way through it. This poetry collection has reinforced my sobriety in the best of ways. I’ve been looking for a book like this, especially since Cacti Fur became one of America’s only, unappologetically DRY poetry journals.

Doesn’t every writer just want to reach out to their readers and say, “you are not alone”? This was one of those books that did that for me. Especially with a little poem like this one, “Turn on all / the lights. / I don’t scurry / anymore.” For me, that sparse poem says so much about what it is to face our inner cockroach. To squash our addictions, to scrape the yellow insides from our waffle tread, and to tell the tale. NEVERWELL proves that poetry can be a way to rise from debauchery into a life of clarity, sobriety, and great artistic achievement. I highly recommend this new collection by Darren C. Demaree, and I wish one day I could write about being sober with such confidence, alacrity and poise.

Review written by Tim Staley of Grandma Moses Press. Review published by Jim Thompson of Cacti Fur.

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Read a Demaree previously published poem from CACTI FUR.

Darren C. Demaree grew up in Mount Vernon, Ohio. He is a graduate of the College of Wooster, Miami University, and Kent State University. He is the author of nineteen poetry collections, most recently neverwell (Harbor Editions, 2023). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Editor-in-chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system and living in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and children.