Review of "Exits" by Stephen C. Pollock

Score: 94+/100 (9.4+ out of 10)

Talk about poetry with a pulse, a microscope, a scalpel, a cathedral, and a shovel.

Exits: Selected Poems by Stephen C. Pollock is a haunting, cerebral, formally impressive, and emotionally resonant poetry collection about mortality, illness, aging, nature, cruelty, climate collapse, memory, legacy, and renewal. Pollock’s preface frames the book around the beauty and frailty of life, the cycles of nature, and the promise of renewal, and that mission statement absolutely pulses through the collection.

This is not light, breezy, “the flowers made me sad” poetry.

This is sophisticated, intricate, complex poetry for high-IQ individuals. A lot of this stuff—quite frankly—is going to go over some people's heads.

Pollock is an absolutely brilliant person. He was a physician, eye surgeon, and neuro-ophthalmologist. He was recruited to Duke University as Chief of Neuro-Ophthalmology, where he was an associate professor. He was also the chief executive of CEC (Community Eye Care). His poetry/writing reflect this brilliance.

This is poetry that understands anatomy, mythology, music theory, ecology, art history, and human grief. It is poetry that knows what a meniscus is, what a tritone is, what Khepri symbolizes, what a biopsy can feel like, and what it means to watch a body or a world slowly fail.

And yet, somehow, it still has enough heart to stop beside an abandoned balloon shop and mourn the invisible breath that once gave someone’s dream its shape.

That is the magic trick of Exits.

Pollock is not merely writing about death. He is writing about exits, and that distinction matters. An exit is not always a disappearance. Sometimes it is a transformation. Sometimes it is a wound. Sometimes it is a memory. Sometimes it is the empty space that proves something was once alive, loved, useful, beautiful, or necessary.

One of the most compelling things about this collection is how Pollock approaches mortality almost like a scientist who knows science is not enough. When we think about medicine, diagnosis, and the body, we often crave precision. We want the broken bone on the X-ray. We want the doctor to point and say, “There it is. That is the problem.” But life, illness, aging, grief, and death are not always that clean. Much of human mortality exists in diagnostic muddy waters. That is where Pollock’s poetry steps in.

When clinical language cannot fully explain what it means to be finite, Pollock turns to myth, architecture, music, nature, and visual art.

That approach is especially powerful in “Nasal Biopsy,” one of the book’s most striking poems. A medical scare becomes a Gothic cathedral. The nose, described through anatomical terms like alae, columella, and nare, becomes an architectural structure. Breath becomes something almost sacred. The doctor becomes a priest-like figure. Gauze becomes a kind of communion wafer offered not to God, but to Pathology. That is brilliant.
The poem is not just being fancy for the sake

of being fancy. It is doing something psychologically profound. It takes a frightening, invasive, humiliating medical moment and gives it symbolic scale. It restores dignity to the patient. It turns the body from a vulnerable object on an exam table into a sacred space where fear, faith, doubt, and mortality all collide.

“Syringe” does something similar, only with even more mythological and neurological complexity. The clinical reality of illness, especially multiple sclerosis, is filtered through the Greek myth of Syrinx, the water nymph transformed into reeds while fleeing Pan. The hollow needle, the hollow reed, the spine, the nervous system, the flute, the body, and the myth all begin to echo one another. There is also a disturbing memory of pithing a frog, inserting a needle between vertebrae and destroying the connection between brain and body. That memory lands like a needle of its own.

This is where Pollock’s poetry is at its most unsettling and most impressive. He understands that the body can become a site of betrayal. But rather than surrendering to that betrayal, he builds symbolic architecture around it. Myth and art become load-bearing walls when the physical spine gives out.

Wow.

And yet, Pollock is not always operating in grand tragedy mode. He also has a dark, strange, surprisingly effective sense of humor. “Tube” is a perfect example. A toothpaste tube narrates its own decline, shrinking into a “rumpled wreck of tin,” lamenting its collapsed rear end and cap that looks like a fez. On paper, that sounds absurd. In practice, it becomes one of the book’s sharpest portraits of aging, depletion, usefulness, and exhaustion.

That final idea, that the tube is “not dead or empty, just depleted,” is funny until it is not. It captures the grinding reality of chronic illness, aging, burnout, and survival. You are not always starring in a Greek tragedy. Sometimes you are just a crumpled tube on the bathroom shelf, still expected to squeeze out whatever you have left.

That is the Pollock effect: he takes something ordinary and turns it into a mirror you may not want to look into.

The nature poems are equally strong, but do not expect a soft, sentimental view of nature. Pollock strips away the Disney version of the natural world and replaces it with something colder, sharper, and more mechanically honest. “Arachnidaea: Line Drawings” is a great example. A dew-covered spiderweb could easily become a pretty poem about morning light. Instead, Pollock sees geometry, predation, ritual, music, time, and death.

The spider is artist, murderer, architect, and maestro. Its web is a trap, a stringed instrument, a clock, and an attempt to impose order against decay. The poem’s language is loaded with design and structure: perpendicular, parallel, cords, patterns, weft, warp. It is beautiful, yes, but it is also ruthless. Pollock seems fascinated by the fact that beauty and brutality can share the same engineering.

That idea continues in “Diabolus in Musica,” one of the collection’s finest formal poems. The poem turns a cicada swarm into a demonic concert, using the musical concept of the tritone, the so-called Devil’s interval, to frame the insects’ mating call as something both natural and infernal. The poem’s closing couplet, asking what composer composed this chorus before decomposing each carcass, is classic Pollock: witty, morbid, musical, and exact.

He loves those turns. Compose becomes decompose. Beauty becomes decay. Song becomes carcass. Nature becomes a factory of reproduction and death.

The formal control here is outstanding. “Diabolus in Musica,” “Zombie Fires,” “Metamorphosis,” and “Waning Crescent” all show Pollock’s command of sonnet-like structure. “Narcissus” is especially clever because its enclosed rhyme scheme mirrors its subject: reflection, reversal, symmetry, and entrapment. The poem does not merely describe a mirror. It behaves like one.

That is high-level craft.

“War Crimes” may be the most morally disturbing poem in the book. The speaker recalls being five years old and using a magnifying glass to burn a living butterfly’s wing. What makes the poem so horrifying is not only the child’s cruelty, but the adult rationalization around it. The parents explain it away as youth, science, curiosity, entomology. Pollock refuses to accept that excuse. He connects that small act of detached cruelty to a much larger continuum of human violence: the Holocaust, lynchings, the killing fields, Salem, bombed villages, and children maimed by war.

That leap could have collapsed into melodrama in a lesser poet’s hands. Here, it works because Pollock is not saying a child burning a butterfly is equivalent to genocide. He is saying that cruelty begins in the same frightening place: the ability to distance oneself from another being’s pain.

The magnifying glass becomes a terrifying metaphor for human technology. We can use the lens to study, understand, illuminate, and protect. Or we can use it to focus the sun and burn the wing.

That same lack of empathy expands to planetary scale in “Zombie Fires,” a climate poem about Arctic fires smoldering beneath permafrost. The image is apocalyptic, but not in a loud Hollywood way. These are not dramatic explosions. They are hidden burns. Fires underground. Damage beneath the surface. Heat surviving winter. The poem’s final image of the planet as a lifeless ballerina circling the sun is devastating. It is elegant, lonely, and cosmically cold.

“Metamorphosis” is quieter but equally pointed. The poem begins with butterflies congregating around a flowering shrub, then pivots to pesticide spraying and disappearance. The closing suggestion that “surely no one’s to blame” is clearly ironic. Someone is to blame. We are. The poem understands how environmental harm often hides behind ordinary household convenience. No villain twirls a mustache. Someone just wants the roaches gone. Then the butterflies vanish too.

The elegiac poems may be the most emotionally accessible pieces in the book. “Leaves,” dedicated to Shinayo Matsumoto, is a beautiful tribute to a ninety-one-year-old woman whose life is captured through rituals, objects, cultural memory, and grace. She loves sumo. She arranges things carefully. She prepares tea. Her hands are wrinkled, twig-like, and still capable of making flowers beautiful. The final image, after her Buddhist ceremony, of leaves dancing in the air is simple and perfect.

That is one of Pollock’s great strengths. He knows when to be dense, but he also knows when to let an image breathe.

“Seeds” is another standout. A goldfinch eating from a dying coneflower becomes a meditation on legacy. One flower is spent, but its seeds continue. The poem’s sonnet-like structure gives the moment weight and inevitability. It is not just about a bird and a plant. It is about the dead, the living, and the unbearable fact that loss can still scatter life.

“Waning Crescent” may be the best poem in the collection for showing how perspective shapes reality. A four-year-old daughter looks at the crescent moon and sees glasses or a fingernail. Her father looks at the same moon and sees a scythe. Same moon. Same sky. Completely different meanings. The child sees focus, play, and imagination. The adult sees time, mortality, and the blade.
That contrast is the whole book in miniature.

The same principle appears in “Dung Beetles,” one of the densest and richest poems in Exits. Pollock links M.C. Escher, Egyptian burial, scarabs, Khepri, dung beetles, waste, art, death, and rebirth. The dung beetle becomes a perfect symbol for the collection’s central philosophy: life takes waste, decay, and endings and uses them to create the next cycle. That may be the closest thing this book has to an answer. We do not escape decay. We make meaning out of it.

And then there is “Steve’s Balloons,” which may be the sleeper gut-punch of the collection. The speaker drives through a weary Southern town and sees the faded remains of a boarded-up balloon shop. The poem could have stopped at nostalgia. Instead, it arrives at something far more profound: a dream is not the deflated rubber left behind, but the breath that once filled it.

Good grief.

That is an incredible image. The material world fails. The sign fades. The store closes. The balloon collapses. But the breath, the intention, the hope that briefly lifted it, mattered.

If there is a criticism to make, it is that Exits can be dense. Very dense. Some readers may find themselves rereading poems like “Syringe,” “Dung Beetles,” and “Cyclone Batsirai, Madagascar, 2022” multiple times before the emotional core fully opens. Pollock’s references are layered, and his poems often assume a reader willing to sit with myth, anatomy, music theory, ecology, and art history. This is not a flaw exactly, but it does mean the collection asks for patience.

However, that patience is rewarded.

The artwork also deserves praise. The book pairs each poem with an image, and these pairings deepen the reading experience. The dew-covered web intensifies “Arachnidaea.” Picasso’s “Girl Before a Mirror” is a smart companion to “Narcissus.” The abandoned storefront photograph makes “Steve’s Balloons” feel grounded and real. The artwork turns the collection into a gallery of exits: biological, spiritual, ecological, personal, and cosmic.

The art is impressive and fits the tone, mood, and subject(s) text. You've got butterflies, engineering layouts, nature, physiology, anatomy, and a burning globe. We won't give the book or the author too much credit for them as most of them are public domain, but it is nice window dressing.

Ultimately, Exits is a brilliant, challenging, beautifully crafted collection about the finite nature of life and the strange forms of renewal that follow loss. It argues, quietly but persistently, that acknowledging death is not a morbid exercise. It is the very thing that gives life urgency. As the Emily Dickinson epigraph in “Time” reminds us, forever is composed of nows. Pollock takes that idea seriously. If life is temporary, then every moment matters more, not less.

This is not always an easy collection. But it is a deeply rewarding one.

It is scientific without being sterile, formal without being stiff, philosophical without being bloodless, and sorrowful without being hopeless. Pollock understands that every body, dream, ecosystem, and life has an exit. But he also understands that exits leave traces.

Seeds.
Leaves.
Breath.
Ash.
Art.
Memory.
And sometimes, if we are lucky: renewal.

Check it out on Amazon!