Jacob Alvarado

David Barrick, Nightlight.

Windsor: Palimpsest Press, 2022. $19.95.

Much like the yellow endpaper hiding behind it’s gloomy cover, Nightlight is a surprising, illuminating collection. A flurry of dreamstates, imaginings, memories, and reflections, Barrick’s poems treat reality as a second skin, slipping in and out of what’s perceivable in ways both disturbing and beautiful.
“On the backlit menu / beside the fish tank, all / options are scratched out.” begins “Frankenfish”, a poem that seems to recount the speaker’s experience ordering an increasingly sinister fish at an increasingly sinister restaurant (“Through the steel dangle / of skillets and ladles, / the deep fryer spits / and cackles.”). It’s in this poem that Barrick marries a palpable creepiness with a knowing wink. Lines like “I am afraid to eat. / I imagine snakes working / their jaws around eggs,” plant horrifying images in a reader’s mind, and yet, the inherent silliness of a “Frankenfish” evokes a kind of B-movie horror sensibility that startles with a sense of fun.
But Barrick isn’t afraid to lean more in one direction than the other. For example, “Recurrent Dream #42” is pure nightmare fuel from its opening lines (“I’ve discovered that you can use / ribs for so much else / she says, opening her / jacket,”), while “Calèche”, describing a visit to a street festival, travels a more innocent route by using the comically grown-up language of a child thumbing through a thesaurus (“Street magus yawps carney jargon. / His crowd-teasing cuadrilla flicks / flaming dirks near dazzled volunteers,”). Whether delving deeper into the tunnels of the mind or travelling closer towards the light, Barrick is exploring how our minds can heighten our emotions, turning dreams into ghosts and memories into grand adventures.
Through its many different styles and forms, Nightlight also makes it a point to keep readers on their toes, with the haunting minimalism of “En Plein Air” (When she smiles / her face crumples– // folds of an old / pumpkin) providing a stark contrast to the surreal prose-poetry of “Balance” (“but he kept dancing, stringy hair / plastered to his skull like an eggplant cap.”). This alternation continues through the whole of the collection, and acts as a showcase of Barrick’s proficiency as a craftsman just as much as it contributes to the collection’s themes. The human mind, mysterious and complex as it is, is an ever-changing landscape that we can’t fully grasp or fully comprehend, and it’s in this constant movement of style that Nightlight finds some of its most beautiful moments.
One of the best of these moments is the poem “Lights Out” . A late entry in the collection (page 74 of 87 to be precise), “Lights Out” is shockingly tender and intimate when compared to most of Barrick’s work, and demonstrates Barrick’s commitment to keeping his readers guessing up until the very end.

The brothers’ voices were so soft they could be mistaken for rustling mice–a precaution to prevent whisper time’s sudden cut-off. The art was to speak in tiny breaths, as if blowing up balloons very slowly and then loosing them out the window, filling the backyard with small, tooth-shaped moons.

So what is one to make of Nightlight? Is it simply an island of misfit poems meant to reflect our chaotic psyches? For this reader at least–and I suspect for many others–something deeper than this is at work. More than exploring the chaos of our inner worlds, Nightlight is a collection that’s interested in chronicling the human experience. These poems cycle between the terrifying, the satisfying, and the confounding, and by reflecting on nonsensical dreamworlds or everyday occurrences, draw most of their power from what is ultimately meaningless or mundane. But it’s by starting from this place of relatability that Nightlight becomes a celebration of perception, turning what often gets jumbled or tucked away in the background into a daring collection that’s both distinctly real and fantastical.
Grinning at its readers with a sharp-toothed smile, Nightlight is a confluence of terror and playfulness. In a bold unpacking of what makes our imaginations tick, Barrick reaches beyond himself to the very dreamstates he describes–and he’ll gladly take you along for the ride, if you dare…

Jacob alvarado

is the editorial intern for The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing and a 4th-year student in the Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College. He lives and writes in Orangeville, Ontario.