Anika Strite

Book Review

A review of Brian Patrick Heston’s Sing, Dark Times (Seven Kitchens Press). Purchase the collection directly from the publisher here.

Considering technological developments of the past half-century such as the domination of redundant images and the proliferation of artificial intelligence, language can be observed as undergoing intense processes of disintegration and (re)formation, with obvious implications for literary production and interpretation. The age-old question stands: what shall we do about form? Narrative? 

Contemporary poetry grapples with its ontological question where the unique significance of form in poetry manifests in the invention of new poetic possibilities through negotiations with form and history (including aesthetic tradition). 

Brian Patrick Heston’s Sing, Dark Times, a chapbook published in December 2025, situates itself as attentive to the violence of twenty-first century experience through its exploration of collective memory. “Twentieth century, we miss you,” Heston writes in “Love Poem for the Twentieth Century.” Nostalgia however, Heston recognizes, is not innocuous; the speaker is still haunted by the promises of the previous century, of “flights to Mars and cancer cured,” as well as its ghosts– “shadows still scream from Hiroshima’s / walls.” “Remember” ends the line, but not the sentence.

Heston is the author of one book-length collection, If You Find Yourself (2014), and a chapbook, Latchkey Kids, from the same year.. What is distinctive about his poetry lies less so in formal innovation than in its communication of a sense of parallelism and simultaneity. The poems are American first, impart a distinctly American desolation tinged with the inheritance of exceptionalism. Some are titled after American places, such as “Atlanta Nocturne” and “Apocalypse Detroit.” However, as we have seen in “Love Poem for the Twentieth Century,” what is American is not solely American, it is engendered and haunted by the violent destruction of foreign populations, who become un-foreign through their subsumption into the definition of American. This is the paradox that Heston illuminates – what it means to be American lies not in definition, but appropriation, and then exclusion.

Heston’s poems not only exist simultaneously across geographic spaces; they make establishing distinct temporalities difficult. Speakers fall into memory that is both personal (“All / my people lay beneath / Pennsylvania,” from “Atlanta Nocturne”) and collective (“after Pop / died, a soldier during the second big one,” from “Bramble and Briar). Even though the digital is not explicitly focused upon, its presence is able to be discerned through the poems’ shakiness of temporality and the fragmented identities of the speakers offered to the reader. These negotiations with existence and non-existence reflect the experience of living in the intensely networked systems of power, information, and knowledge of the twenty-first century. By not mentioning specific dates or time periods, Heston creates the possibility for alternative temporalities and ways of remembering and experiencing grief that lie outside of the globalized and standardized time that works in service of empire and capital.

The very title of Sing, Dark Times implies collective loss, yet recalls history in its naming of our moment(s) as Dark Times. The Dark Times are now and before, but there is an imperative: Sing, says Heston. As John Berger writes in “The House of Poetry,” what poetry does is “break the silence of events.” Heston provides us poetry that acts as a re-form-ulated voice both individual and collective. The response to darkness is music, which holds the power to harm, as demonstrated by the poem with the title “How the Bullet Sings.” Still, Heston believes in aesthetic beauty as a space of possibility, of hope: in the bullet poem, he says, “I want to sing the body into flight.” 

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Sing, Dark Times

Brian Patrick Heston

Seven Kitchens Press

29pp

$12

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Anika Strite studied literature, French, and history at Barnard College. In addition to works of criticism, she writes fiction and poetry. She edits for L’Esprit Literary Review and the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism. She is currently working on her first novella.