“Seesaw” is a captivating and engaging poetry collection showcasing the collaborative efforts of Ken Tomaro and Nolcha Fox, who blend their distinct voices to explore the themes of love, loss, and memory sautéed in a quirky sense of humour.
“Why am I so hard on myself? That’s it, today’s the day! I’m going to write a book called
On Being Sympathetic
To the Apathetic Empath.” The same quirky sense of humour flows raw and poignant throughout the pages of the book. Ken Tomaro and Nolcha Fox have done a wonderful job with their shared experiences from the Thursday Night Poets group. The poems are arranged in a unique stanza pattern where Nolcha’s right-aligned stanzas complement Ken’s left-aligned stanzas. This visual distinction symbolises the back-and-forth dynamic of a seesaw, enhancing the reading experience to a lofty level.
“And now I want a sandwich, but it won’t make itself. Maybe I can train the rats how to cook.”
These lines remind me of Remy, the rat in “Ratatouille”.
This book celebrates a variety of themes, from mundane life struggles to whimsical reflections on human existence and is punctuated with playful absurdity. Throughout the collection, the tone oscillates between melancholic and whimsical and grave to light. This interplay creates a rich emotional landscape, allowing the reader to experience both the weight of sorrow and the levity of joy.
Poems like “All I Can Think of Is Food” and “God Drops the Ball Again” reflect the authors’ penchant for irony and wit. “He is a house” and “I come to a door” left a lingering sadness that overshadows my senses for a long time. Poems like “Ghosts Glimmer” and “Where the Wild Goose Goes” evoke a sense of longing and nostalgia, while others, such as “Chimes,” reflect the inevitability of change and the bittersweet rhymes of memories. “As surely as” is a salute to the ubiquitous power of gravity on us.
The poems are like different strokes of brushes on the canvas of poetic mindscape, evoking different colours of human emotions,
“Blue is the sadness when we say our goodbyes.”
Sometimes the promised humour turns into a grave philosophic enigma, –
“Past and future, like the branches of a tree lead to different paths, sometimes the same regret.”
Ken Tomaro and Nolcha Fox play on the subtlest of chords to bring out the most mesmerising music in the world. They play with words with such charisma that: “sharp words slice the sunlight into little pats of butter.”
This collection is for everyone whose wallet is full of bugs and cobwebs, and for those who prefer to
“slouch on the couch,
a ‘-slab of apathy
sandwiched between the pillows,”
or someone infected with the flu sharing every small piece of him or her with each cough to the world. Ken Tomaro and Nolcha Fox have taken their readers through the rollercoaster of raw humour with an urgent poignancy of human passion, where the complexities of our decisions and the ultimate helplessness of our lives leave us to feel the eternity of a bottomless well.
