If you’re looking for a tourist experience on the Loneliest Road in America, don’t rely on Nevada in Our Teeth: Crossing Highway 50, a slim new travelogue in verse by Las Vegas poets Jennifer Battisti and Andrew Romanelli. Sure, you could deduce from its pages a few points of visitor interest in the cow counties — Lehman Caves sounds groovy, as does the Churchill Arts Council gallery in Fallon, and the Drugstore Museum in McGill, “a relic that stuns us with humanity,” Battisti writes — but the authors aren’t after the guidebook clarity that the looky-loos among you might want.
Remember, they’re poets. So Nevada in Our Teeth concerns itself with spirit of place, the gestalt of travel, the shifting meaning of “loneliness” 40 years after Life magazine handed the highway its perfect marketing slogan. Funded by a grant from the Nevada Arts Council, Battisti and Romanelli traveled to, from, and along Highway 50, searching for the stuff poets look for: essences and inspirations, eternity and ephemerality, connections and disruptions, memory prompts, feeling prompts, writing prompts.
Much of which they found, in varying proportions. The book’s contrapuntal structure sees the two trading poems, Battisti often supplying blocks of lyrically intense prose poetry, both riffing on what they encounter. For instance, that familiar feature of the road, “the mirage which dies/over and over/opening up a little expanse for you/to die too/without consequence or fuel rewards.” (That’s Battisti again.) Some poems retain the ragged informality of having been notebooked in the passenger seat at 70 mph, as when Romanelli fires off that old groaner about car travel: “What’s the last thing that goes/through a bug’s mind?/Its ass.” I know, I know. And yet: It neatly gets at the way long drives loosen your head — after a few hundred miles, you’ll find anything funny — and reminds us of the millions of daily shit-gets-real episodes that constitute nature.
Human nature, too: In a poem dedicated to the areas of Ely, Ruth, and McGill, he catches a hard whiff of outback dissolution: “This is where the world failed to end.” At the same time, when Battisti observes, about a diner in Pioche, “Lace/curtains droop with bacon grease and/top 40,” her wry specificity reminds you of every rural diner where you’ve been called “Hon.” That’s how poetry functions, and this book, too. Just as Nevada’s emptier regions aren’t for everyone — as a poem here puts it, “you could love it for reasons/that put off the next person” — so it goes for Nevada in Our Teeth. As always with poetry, your mileage may vary. Me, I enjoyed the ride.
Nevada in Our Teeth
by Jennifer Battisti and Andrew Romanelli
56 pages, $10
Andrewromanelli.com
