Deepfake Serenade, Chris Banks
Nightwood
Editions, 2021
In “No Soliciting,” the poet writes: “ I can’t remember the combination lock/to civilization” and “Adulthood is carrying a bag of darkness/over a shoulder. Sometimes you stick/a hand in it.” In “Mint Condition,” he asks what is left after you’ve used up childhood similes and metaphors, and then goes on to suggest an answer: “Figments are rent-to-own. Herald the news./Live life in your own key. Substitute fries/for existentialism. Time to rebrand the ocean.” What Banks does really wonderfully is play with—and cheekily subvert—the aspects of everyday life. Serious topics like depression, love and loss, and global warming also find places to live inside Deepfake Serenade, and that ends up being part of its overall charm. He offers, too, suggestions for fighting any darkness when he writes “When the trap door opens,/grow wings. That is the only way to disperse a crowd. To know you are really alive.” It is not just all clever wordplay and whimsy. There is a search for light amidst darkness that poets might recognize as familiar.
You’ll need to take a breath once in a while. It's a good thing, to dip in and out of Deepfake Serenade, to let it sink and settle in. That’s part of the beauty of his work. Banks is a master of documenting popular culture. In “Inkblots,” he writes: “I have measured out my life in K-Cups,” a tip of the hat to T.S. Eliot’s love song to Prufrock, and in “Honeydripper,” he writes: “I’m all out/of slogans and Johnny Cash lyrics to explain/where we go from here.” As a fellow high school English teacher, I appreciate the references to his day job.
In the titular poem, “Deepfake Serenade,” Banks writes from the perspective of Romeo, admitting to having killed Tybalt and realizing that “our stars are not crossed so much as shining/in separate hemispheres.” There are beautiful lines in this first piece, as Banks writes: “Bodies are wiring. Love is the circuit.” He reminds us that to “push desire beyond the outwardness of roses/is to feel thorns.” Throughout the collection, there are everyday references to his students, their youth in contrast to his being about to turn 50, and how much he loves teaching kids about poetry and literature. I’m biased here. Those lines—the ones that speak to the magic that seems to strike like lightning in a classroom despite external pressures on teachers—are lovely. They show the reader that poets live everywhere, even teaching your kids how to love stories and life.
Banks is a poet of nostalgia, as many reviewers have noted after reading his various books of poetry. If you’re in your late 40s or early 50s, reading Deepfake Serenade will make you smile wistfully. There’s something to be said for the warm pull of nostalgia, of how it can bring us comfort—especially in a pandemic year. Listening to music from a certain period in our lives, reading books that we first read as young people, but all with a teaching note to remember that “the mirror ball of time spins, the music/plays, and the time for dancing is now.” In “Avatar, Sweet Avatar,” Banks writes of “the year of living hermetically sealed inside houses,/away from each other. Away from monarch butterflies/and neighbourhood ponds and calculus formulas.” One of my favourite lines in this poem is “STEM is cool/but have you tried the arts?”, especially in relation to how the arts have saved us in the dark days of the pandemic, even if some won’t easily admit to that fact.
It feels impossible to accurately describe what Banks does in Deepfake Serenade. Maybe it’s because the images and lines tumble over one another, wanting to be seen and heard before you make your way to the next poem. They demand that you pay attention to them as a reader. It’s a collection that calls you to read a poem, sink into it and think about it, and then return later. There’s no rushing here, and you wouldn’t want to rush anyway because the beauty is in the details.
