Book Reviews

Thin Places
Salmon Poetry, 2025

Thin Places Aaron Belz
Salmon Poetry, 2025 Published in Chiron Review, Issue #139, Winter, 2025

Ed Nudelman’s new collection of poems is as much a carefully plotted map of himself as a biological, chemical, physics-bound entity as it is a series of lyric observations and memories of his life. This poet’s best lens — and he’s aware of it, because he establishes it from the beginning — is something more akin to a microscope than to, say, a diary or epistolary. And what he records, then, feel like field notes on observed phenomena.

Thin Places’ establishing shot is of a man in a science lab working on the “world’s most toxic poison.” I picture the prim assistant chemist in Breaking Bad, Gale Boetticher, delighted by the process even if the outcome is morbid. We have a hint of Nudelman’s spirituality even here, though, for the instructions to take extra precautions when handling this substance end with “burn your clothes, and put / on sackcloth and ashes.”

The second poem, “Self-Analyst,” playfully flips to a spiritual context in which a shaman “explains transference,” and the poet responds by longing for a “decent / pair of jeans.” In eleven lines we move from the broadly spiritual to the profoundly mundane.

In subsequent poems, the same tension is played. For example, a man narrowly misses being pulverized by an out of control truck, and responds by “solv[ing] for breaking distance, / allowing for variables of fate, / simultaneity and providence.” His approach to mortal emergency is to immediately form a theory that includes “demons and angels” and test its plausibility. He remembers his father’s lawn mowing ritual as “wrestling / with the yard’s entropy.” A late night snack turns into “stirring” the dog, who barks, waking the house, and he realizes he’s “tinkered with fate, / upsetting a tenuous equilibrium.”

When he opens a poem by referring to himself as “a real / cow in a hypothetical pasture,” Nudelman’s fully orbed self-snaps into focus. He’s not just a slightly crazed scientist, not merely a person tired of spiritual cliché, not just a family man stumbling around his house. He’s “real” and keenly aware of having been breathed into existence at some ineffable, unpicturable place in the universe. Somehow in a cold physical universe, a real cow was born, and that cow is Ed Nudelman.

As the first section closes (there are three), Nudelman breaks into a sequence of reveries, of intimacy with his wife (“inertia violated”), of crows flocking black across the sky, his backyard “flooded grass, once a green cathedral / of clover and bee,” and of the whole enormous universe. His posture becomes increasingly one of looking up with arms stretched wide — “I am bleeding heart earthman, / plugged into sod like a briefly / blooming perennial, impromptu / cheerleader of all things corporeal.” If this is where pure science and mild human disaffection has led him, the reader welcomes it and is thankful for the journey.

Section two resets the narrative in Nudelman’s childhood and diligently remembers snapshots of his life, culminating in a walk through a graveyard with his grandchildren. As they barrage him with questions, he thinks: “They always want to know / what happens, and why — / And to be honest, so do I.” In his grandfather-self we see the child again, always curious; but the mature man has learned context and gratitude, clearly, because when he’s not slyly joking, or lamenting world-weariness, he’s deeply celebrating the joy of living in such a world.

Again in the third section, the poet returns to children and parents and their rituals of intergenerational experience, actively probing and seeking to understand the world around them. The arc ends with a candle lit memory of his mother’s passing. In typical Nudelman form, the focus is not on his mother at all, but on a fruitfly that enters the room and wings its way toward the flame. All the poet wants is the safety of the fly. Again, the infinitesimal emerges as a symbol for the infinite, and on its tiny back carries all the weight of grief and mystery.

The poems that round out the collection continue to teem like petri dishes — in detail fine enough that it warrants and rewards close inspection. And there is an intentionality throughout that keeps the reader engaged, allowing the poet occasional indulgence in a less profound story or more personal revelation.

It’s not often in contemporary poetry that one encounters what might be termed pure joy. Somehow, through his science-mindedness, wit, humility, and verbal alacrity, Ed Nudelman gives us just that. — Aaron Belz

-Aaron Belz. American poet, critic, and academic who holds a PhD from St. Louis University and has taught literature and creative writing at the university level. Belz is the author of several poetry collections, including Lovely, Raspberry, The Bird Hoverer, and White Lies, and his poems and essays have appeared in a wide of range of literary journals and magazines. In addition to his poetry, he has written criticism and reviews, and has been active in literary communities through teaching, readings, and scholarly participation, including a popular radio series that has aired for two decades. 

Rae Armantrout

In Thin Places, Ed Nudelman, a retired cancer researcher, brings a scientist’s keen observation and balanced equanimity to bear on our “ordinary,” if sometimes painful, human experiences. With gentleness and patience, Nudelman watches the doings of fruit flies, humming birds, and moles, as well as his mother’s progress into the wilds of Alzheimer’s disease. This book is, by turns, comic, joyful, and heart-breaking.”

 —Rae Armantrout. One of the founding members of the West Coast group of Language poets, is author of more than ten collections of poetry, including Versed (2009), which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and Wobble (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Armantrout is a professor emerita at University of California, San Diego, where she taught for more than 20 years and was the longtime director of the New Writing Series.