Trespass

December 1, 2014
In his National Poetry Series-winning debut collection, Dooley demonstrates a fascination with the ways in which human beings invade one another's spaces, and in doing so invade themselves. Enthralled by family mythos, his best work hinges on a father who "thought his body/ was small/ and quiet/ like a girl's," and later becomes the perpetrator of a sexual assault that drives the family apart: "Bobby, his sister says/ there are some accusations// against you." Tender, nuanced, angry, and answerless, Dooley's poems concerning his father and aunt are a brief testament to the power of writing about tragedy and taboo with empathy and disbelief. In the book's most arresting poem, "Snapshot," his breathless lines depict a woman searching for a picture of Dooley's father in order to cope with her pain by defacing the picture: "her therapist said find one put it/ on the bathroom floor so she searched albums/ for his face." Dooley falters, however, in his attempts to turn the experiences of people outside his blood and kin into poems of trespass. And despite several ambitious poems that deal with coming out and fatalist anxiety about sexuality, many of Dooley's poems attempt to "verb" their way into a narrative through action words instead of creating an arresting poem by building a small world out of language.