Emergency Hallelujah opens with stiff mannequins coming to life and repopulating the nostalgic old clothes store the narrator used to live above (“Old Neighborhood”). This reoccurs throughout the work: inanimate objects are brought to life and made to act out the strange imaginings of the narrator’s memory. While the poems here are tickling the surreal, they are mostly melancholy; the narrator is lonely and the reanimated objects serve as friends, as familiarities With the mannequins of the opening poem , Heroux sets up the rest of the work by giving the reader people-like objects, non-persons brought to life that reflect the shadows of other people who haunt the work; when in the next stanza the reader reads “The paperboy was/ an elderly blind lady”, the mannequins echo. The reader is able to see the stiffness, the non-reality of the woman – she too is a prop, an object of nostalgia that can never quite be fully realized every again. It is this loss (of never becoming whole again, even in memory) that structures and resonates throughout the rest of the poems.

Heroux illustrates this loss with a very deft balance of universality and individuality, struggling valiantly to be familiar while striding away from the maudlin. Often the poems concern large (and heavily symbolic objects) such as the sun, moon, stars, trees . For example, the poem “Codeine” reads “The moonlight shines on the wall/ showing blank slides/ of vacations it never went on”; the moon here is animated, basking (literally) in the light of memory. Initially the reader is struck first by the cosmic quality of the choices, the expansive nature the poems choose to take on. The poems are big and are talking about life on a grand, relatable scale. But the impressive power of works such as “On This Street” or “Midwinter” comes from these large symbols; instead of coming off as well-worn or cliché, they are reinvigorated by the strange personification (similar to the earlier mannequins). The reader is given footprints in fresh snow as dark pills (“On the Outskirts of Desire”) and a sunset as the sun moving “its furniture out of the day’s apartment” (“No Swimming Allowed”).

Yet, if the symbols were left as they were, simple postcards that “make it new,” the poems could be dismissed. What is particularly intriguing about the work as a whole is that these symbols are repeated, then again. And again. Later, snow is re-described as the train at the second-to-last stop (“The Fallen Snow Pauses”); The sun is a presidential speech on every channel (“Cityscape”) then sheds its leaves into night (the stunning 6 part poem “Living Forever for a Little While”). With each repetition, the object turns slightly and becomes richer, creating a densely layered work that compliments the themes of memory and nostalgia perfectly.

While setting up these large expansive universal symbols, Heroux keeps the work grounded in the small moments of the individual, balancing generalized relatablility with individual reflection and detail. The voice of the narrator is funny and engaging, dipping into silliness and surrealism naturally; poems like “The Sane Asylum” and “Suicidal Toaster” give detail and lightness to a work that needs that breathing space. Further, it creates a unique voice to speak from, a narrator that the reader likes and trusts so when he/she interrupts with lines like “I fell asleep on my couch/ listening to the evening’s radio” (or poems like “Next Door”) the reader is able to connect the “I” of those poems to the universal themes the works are trying so hard to explore. However, there are times, especially as the work goes on, that this act and focus on the “I” gets a big tiring and perhaps solipsistic (“It Wasn’t Early or Late” for example). The work might be better served to move away from the singular point of view of observation and into the world around it. The reader begins to expect a deeper delving into memory and nostalgia than the photo-book snapshots but never receives it. This could be done by breaking away from the strict prosaic voice the poems carry, branching out from the encampment in the lyric and moving towards more the ambitious forms of surrealism and sub-consciousness the works seem to be nibbling at.

But at the end, Emergency Hallelujah satisfies. The sadness that underlines the inevitable change of a person’s life and is then refracted in the constant remembrance of the work is touching and honest. The hope the books gives is in the cyclical cosmos it takes so much imagery from: the sun and moon and sky and rain will be there again tomorrow, different, new.