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The Boy Who Reads in the Trees

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By Ron Mohring
“There were no small sorrows then,” Ron Mohring writes in The Boy Who Reads in the Trees, “only children too small to contain them.” Mohring has written a devastating collection about how we contain and survive pain, abuse, grief. These are poems in which the act of remembering is an act of saving. “I leave our monster,” the speaker says, “I go back to save that boy / from what he will conceal: his shame.” While the book centers on a particularly violent childhood, the speaker flashes forward at times. “We’ve taught / ourselves to swathe the past with laughter,” he writes, then wonders in the same poem, “And what / shall I do with this sudden rage.” The Boy Who Reads in the Trees is the answer—since storytelling and other acts of revelation are what the speaker turns to in order to live. In these poems, Mohring has crafted a place for rage to transform into beauty. What these poems reckon with, and the sheer astonishment that they achieve, will level you. You’ll read this book again. And again. —James Allen Hall, author of Romantic Comedy and Now You’re the Enemy