The only ironic line in Zachary Schomburg’s 2009 collection of poetry, Scary, No Scary, is also the most important. Eerily calm, the speaker foretells of a return to a childhood home in the titular opening poem:

The irony stems from the fact that the advice is the opposite of the tour Schomburg hosts and which readers experience – for the book is an experience, a psychological trip into a skewed Wonderland, a terrifying jumbling of the hideous, the sublime, and the all too real. There “beating heart[s],” “dead hummingbirds,” “river[s] of lava,” and a “bear with no legs” meet – and thrive. Anything goes. As Schomburg writes in “The Old Man Who Watches Me Sleep,” “If you have a soul/it may have been put in there backward.” If – for nothing in Schomburg’s world is certain.

While dismissing the book as an uninspired obsession with the faux-surreal may be tempting, a close reading reveals clever contemporaneity. Freudian though they may be, the poems are neither post-apocalyptic nor pre-political. Rather, they reflect a world where dream and reality intersect, where latent content manifests itself with disturbing clarity. Questions of identity are omnipresent, as in “I Found a Beating Heart Half-Buried In The Woods:”

Later, I found a woman half-buried not far from where I found the beating heart. Is this your beating heart? I asked. She didn’t answer. She didn’t have a larynx. She didn’t even have a thorax. She didn’t have anything. Not even arms of legs or a head. She really wasn’t a woman as much as she was the space between dead leaves. No, it’s yours she said.

The effect of Scary, No Scary is both immediate and lasting. Laced with punctums, the book illuminates a twisted dream-existence that seeps beyond the comforts of normality and finds horror in the everyday.

The book’s impact stems not from the believability of the events described but from the surfacing of elements that are unexpectedly reminiscent of real life. Already immersed in an atmosphere of sedated uneasiness, readers are reminded of the arbitrariness of boundaries. Time slips back and forth between the past, present, future, and unknown. Things change unpredictably into other things. More often than not, the events have no positive resolutions. A speaker apologizes for a birthday party but receives no reassurance; a man cries over an irreversible error; a person walks into the woods and never comes back. Equally unsettling is the cool frankness with which Schomburg describes the events. In “The Black Hole,” for instance, the speaker calmly recalls the likely deadly fall of another person:

Schomburg couples disconcerting realities of life with an existentialist struggle with identity. Seemingly unable to fulfill his existence simply through his own self, the ever-present “I” adopts other identities, both animate and inanimate. Like “babies again,” Schomburg’s speakers discover themselves and the world anew – but with no clear result. Often confusion ensues, as in “The Pond:” “My body is designed/for more than one thing./I am inside myself, fogging myself up.” People become unrecognizable as they transform into jaguars and invisible trees or have their insides devoured by insects. And readers do not escape. Indeed, part of what makes the collection so compelling is that Schomburg makes readers his accomplices. Schomburg engages readers with direct address, and by speaking in the present or future affirmative, makes this their journey as well. Schomburg forces readers to take part in the events and “look from a complex eye.” “Neither of us have names,” remarks a speaker, “especially you.” As Schomburg carves his psychological journey, readers are tugged along, floating down a river that winds deeper and deeper into the realm of the fantastical and the deliberately unexplored.

Schomburg drives the book by using repetition to layer meaning. Although his themes border on overuse, he avoids tiring readers by building upon established images and hinting at an unofficial, fragmented narrative. The themes also link his traditionally formatted poems with his prose poems. In keeping with the amorphous nature of the incidents, the poems flow into each other, forming a tenuous sequence of events where the common subjects serve as much-needed punctuators. Underscoring the poems’ thematic ties is the index, cleverly arranged to include ideas – “Compression (specifically, the idea of being crushed into a tiny cube)” – as well as subject matter – “Insects”, “Leaves.”

The genius of Scary, No Scary stems from its surprising relevance. For despite its haunting images, or perhaps because of them, it recalls readers’ own experiences. With his broken hummingbirds, black holes, and pleading, lost people, Schomburg gives voice to some of the most fundamental human emotions: fear, bewilderment, love, regret. Life seems at times almost unbearably incomprehensible. And yet the speaker trudges forth. Schomburg’s book ends with the speaker left waiting for the world to begin again. Readers, too, are waiting. Here they find the full irony of Schomburg’s title: “The world is unhinged,” but they’re not scared.