by Paul Zits
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2022/$19.99/80 pp.
Toxic masculinity—to some a slur; to others a summation of male character—is the Achilles heel that Calgary’s Paul Zits aims to remediate in his fourth poetry collection. The book’s title, which Zits cribbed from an interview Ryan Gosling gave to W magazine, refers to the star of the 1970s/1980s detective show Columbo. While Zits never makes it clear why Gosling hankers after being Peter Falk, the Canadian heartthrob comes across in the interview as wanting to embody a thinking man’s suave, tough-guy mystique. Zits unravels the pratfalls of such potentially manipulative, narcissistic aspirations and how they further ensnarl romantic entanglements in these mordant, aphoristic poems.
Zits’s narrator descends from a storm troop of past masculinities, including the “white, male, middle-class pig,” the “male feminist” and the “metrosexual.” In past decades, each was the whipping boy for the male ego’s critics; what distinguishes Zits’s addition to this literature of truth and little reconciliation is his decision to present the toxic male from within. Though his narrator hasn’t much self-awareness—the few instances being imbued with self-pity (“I don’t laugh / I don’t cry / I don’t sleep calmly”)—what he does reveal about himself is telling: “I have set out / to out-alpha them all / like a tower / weaponized by the sunshine.” Zits’s narrator unloads his anxieties onto his friend-with-benefits-slash-love-interest, her phantom presence in his life semaphored through such flags as “she says.” Mostly she’s a green screen for his confidences: “Grooming keeps my stress levels low.”
Reading I Wish I Could be Peter Falk, I found myself recalling Margaret Atwood’s 1971 poetry collection Power Politics, best known for its first four lines: “you fit into me / like a hook into an eye // a fish hook / an open eye.” Zits updates Atwood’s jaundiced view of male–female relations by casting equally damning hooks of his own (“She sits close, / a giant planet / crammed up against its star / …. I am a thinking woman’s fetish object, / I think”) and by trading in Atwood’s kitschy 1960s references for present-day signifiers lifted from wireless technology, gaming and social media. In fact, many of his stanzas have the apparently aphoristic concision of tweets: “I’m trying to find a way / to express something / about loneliness / and make it feel sexy / and immortal.” How’s that for a reworking of Keats and Wordsworth in less than 140 characters? Despite being versed in 21st century tropes of gender equality, Zits’s toxic male feels as blindsided as the women he dominates: “Our conversation / is a Tetris game / come to life.” My advice is this: read Paul Zits’s cagily executed poems strategically in order to win access.
John Barton is an editor and the author of 12 books of poetry.
