A Review of Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s The Year of No Mistakes

Book
The Year of No Mistakes
by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

Bestseller by the author: Dr. Mütter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine;Number of skulls in the Mütter Museum’s Hyrtl Skull Collection: 139; Tallest human skeleton in the Mütter Museum:7’6”; Most literary specimen in the Mütter Museum: the conjoined livers of Chang and Eng Bunker; Book by author yielding most disappointment among dirty old men performing Google searches: Hot Teen Slut; Closest thing to a hot teen slut in the Mütter Museum: the Soap Lady, the corpse of a woman in her mid-twenties whose body essentially turned to soap as it decomposed

Central Question: Does the future haunt the past?

The author photo at the end of The Year of No Mistakes is by no means slick. It’s a snapshot, taken, we can only assume, by someone in love—and who, in turn, the soft and hopeful smile of the poet suggests, is loved deeply and tenderly. Yet the photo credit buried in the collection’s front pages tells another story: “Author photo by Jeffrey Paul Seasholtz.” Not Jeff,not JP, certainly not Shappy: Jeffrey Paul, a name as formal as it is distant from the intimacy of the photo itself. Fittingly, the poetry that bridges the gap between the credit and the image chronicles the dissolution of Aptowicz’s eleven-year relationship with fellow poet Shappy Seasholtz. What emerges is not just the story of a breakup but a meditation on the passage of time and the uncanny resilience of the human heart.

Early on, Aptowicz offers a backward glance at the days when the relationship was full of promise. In “These United States,” two young lovers travel cross-country, high-fiving each other over barbecue, “mouths too full to form words,” making wishes to “an entire flock of shooting stars” while riding a Greyhound from one state to the next. In other poems, Manhattan feels “like an old Woody Allen joke” and the Bowery is a place where the lovers dance “like ball bearings” and laugh “like ripped newspapers.” Even so, Brooklyn, with its “white people… riding retro bikes all over,” can’t help but make the poet feel “old and poor,” while a constant flux of storefronts underscores the fleeting passage of time: “The café became another café became a juice place / became a snack bar became a café became a beefery / became an empty space.”

In the end, it’s being old and poor—or, more accurately, the all-too-quotidian reality that time passes and money is always in short supply—that does the once-young lovers in. Travel, formerly an occasion for wonder, becomes a necessity as Aptowicz describes moving first to Philadelphia...