There is a subtle pleasure in pigeon-holing people. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t do it with such gusto. It appeals to our sense of order and perhaps even justice to believe that humanity could be classified by vocation, proclivity, or coolness. We rely so naturally upon stereotypes, they seem fertile if unexploited territory for poetic exploration. But the title of Gabe Foreman’s new collection of poems, A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People, makes a promise that its contents don’t quite keep.

Foreman’s poems are playful and experimental in an almost childlike way, but the encyclopedic concept of the collection reins in rather than expands on his creativity. Rather than take advantage of our natural passion for taxonomy by relishing stereotypes or, on the other hand, debunking their allure, Foreman uses them to frame a collection that is really closer to a concept album than an encyclopedia. These poems, named for different types of people ( “Control Freaks,” “The Lovesick,” “Underdogs”), lose as much as they gain from their association with one another.

The variety in the collection is impressive and makes for many surprises. In addition to couplets, stanzas, and prose, poems take the form of eye charts, Venn diagrams, mad libs, and a recipe for “Tough Cookies.” Many seem to have been born out of constraint-based exercises. Sometimes surprising and moving poetic leaps result, as in a trio of poems where the National Audubon Field Guide to Insects and Spiders’ entry on mayflies is used to describe “Adulterers,” “Frequent Flyers,” and “Day Traders”: “To reproduce, thousands of male stockbrokers perform a kind of dance, flying up and down in great swarms.” The tone is light, but the overall effect is more ambiguous. To make a poem out of a game of Hangman may seem like a joke, but the somewhat ominous message revealed in “Doodlers” is not quite funny.

As is often the case with constraint-based poetry, where accident is favored over intention, incongruous and unpremeditated images can emerge. Yet the spontaneity of Foreman’s leaps can feel compromised by the form of the collection as a whole. The poems’ titles limit rather than expand them. Foreman’s images are often delightfully or disturbingly Surrealist, yet he keeps himself on a frustratingly short leash. One wonders whether the poems would have been better served if they hadn’t been forced into such a formulated, predetermined group. As it is, rather than anchoring the collection, the concept of an encyclopedia contributes to a lack of clarity that hampers the weaker poems.

Some of the deftest moments in the book happen when the poems refer to one another, such as “Organ Donors” and “Transplant Survivors,” who seem to share the same doubts about the hereafter. These moments of echo create a thread that begins to open the collection to itself, but they are too rare to create a real sense of cohesion. Perhaps its unfair to ask an arc of a reference book, but like any encyclopedia, while this one includes some fascinating entries, it doesn’t feel as whole as other books do.

Abby Paige is a Montreal writer whose recent projects are chronicled at www.abbypaige.com

Tagged as: BOOKS, Gabe Foreman