ADAM WILSON, THE INSTRUCTIONS.

SAN FRANCISCO: TWO STAPLE PRESS, 2025. $12.00

The Canadian poet Adam Wilson approaches the journey of adulthood tactfully in The Instructions. Readers follow a single speaker as they placate their emotions through music, photography, and memory. The Instructions greets readers with black and white photographs, captured by Wilson, setting the chapbook’s tone: viewing art created by others and creating art of your own eases the harsh realities of life's losses. Wilson’s writing converts life’s difficulties into inspiring, youthful poetry.

While exploring the challenges one feels to create work that sparks joy when the artists’ mind is shrouded, the poems’ speaker does not wallow in misery. Instead, they share recurring motifs of water and photography which serves as a reminder to themself and their readers that life undergoes repeating cycles of cleansing and creation. In “The Politics of Being Clean,” Wilson uses water to represent hope and beginnings. The speaker says, “Our politics begin with laundry, / we wash away what doesn't dream” (8-9). Here, readers are struck with the idea that we can choose to fill our lives with the things that bring us joy. Let the rest, let anything without the capacity to foster our dreams, be pulled down the drain with the dirty laundry water.

To me, many of Wilson’s poems end with a rebirth for the speaker as they teeter between grief for their sister, the world, or torn relationships and their hope for the new possibilities awaiting them. In places readers may expect dark thoughts to constrict the poem, Wilson is nuanced and light. In poems where the speaker embraces the chaos around them, Wilson uses clattering rhythm and repetition. In “King of the Little Crisis,” Wilson creates short, choppy lines leaving readers feeling uneasy, queasy, as if they have been pulled under harsh waves and are fighting to get their head above the water.

Above the grief and art and anguish and hope, this is a chapbook about love. Our speaker not only sees the beauty in the world crumbling around them, but accepts self-love. The speaker says, “I love the people who have hurt me, historically, who made me choose between becoming something like them or becoming something better” (Second-Hand Emotion 31-32). Wilson’s poetry reads like an ’80s pop ballad blasting from the dusty
speakers of your bluetooth speakers, bringing you to a nostalgic time, reminding you of how it felt to be young and bursting with dreams.
You can read Adam Wilson’s poem “Do You Want Vaporwave or Do You Want the Truth?” in Issue No. 6 of The Ampersand Review.