Book Report: Secretary of the Invisible Thing by Lance Larsen (2026)

I got this chapbook, the winner of the Rattle magazine Chapbook of the Year prize, because I entered a poetry contest with a reading fee that came with a subscription to Rattle. Not sure when I will get to reading my new subscription–I have a great number of literary magazines to which I subscribed over the years or older copies that I’ve picked up at book sales in the past, and I have a desk drawer in the parlor full of old history magazines, Renaissance festival magazines, and beer magazines that I subscribed to around the turn of the century and years of First Things I will get to when the topical articles are history. But I had just finished Treasures of Truth as my night-ending poetry (The Rape of the Lock being a reading chairside table book, not the collections and magazines containing shorter poems that I prefer to read right before bed), so I read this book over the course of a couple of nights before lights out.

And…. Well, I guess Lance Larsen is one of my favorite poets from the second quarter of the 21st century, maybe even of the 21st century, but that’s not a high bar to clear. The work is better than Rupi Kaur and most of the self-published work that I read and pretty much all of the grandmother poetry I read. Unfortunately, though, I read the work after encountering the phrase “small i poetry” somewhere, and although the research I’ve done (a Google search) indicates this definitely (as far as an LLM knows) refers to ee cummings and his lack of capitalization to indicate wonder, contextually (if I remember), it meant how poets insert themselves into their poems. And I saw this meme again:

I know, I know, it’s been this way at least since the romantic poets, and my favorite poet (Edna St. Vincent Millay) does this consistently, and I know, I know, I do this all the time (see also). The latest poem I sent to the very contest which brought this chapbook to my door is almost two pages of me me me. So perhaps I was too harsh in my reading of this fellow’s work. Perhaps I was jealous; he’s certainly made more of a go of it than I have; poems in this volume previously appeared even in the hometown(ish) Missouri Review.

That being said: The poet-narrator of these particular poems often makes note of physical places where he is, cities and states and whatnot, and they acted as an abstraction layer–I was reading a poem, I was not in the poem. I hope I’m not doing too much of that, but, probably I am. A couple of the poems feel like filler–a list of thoughts from a hammock, for example–perhaps a good blog post, but a poem? Nah.

So: Better than average, but not on the pantheon of the best ever. Which, I suppose, is the best I can hope for, too.