reflection toward John Colasacco’s ‘Parental Love’ (Long Day Press, May 2026)

Parental Love
John Colasacco
Long Day Press, May 2026

John Colasacco’s Parental Love is a protean agony grounded in the non-angelic spiritual hoax of care. Parental Love is also or only imagining a dog, or having a dog, or hitting a deer while having a dog to come home to. I don’t know. Sometimes the baby gets cut in two because it belongs. Belonged. If a short story is written by a poet injured in a suicide note revised by an angel fooled by resurrection, can we use the note? Have I been left in a dream to hear the outlasted languages of its insomniac narrator? Divorce comes in threes. As do fathers, as do mothers. Childhood is already mostly a separation from the verse that speaks of one’s raising. Colasacco knows we are creatures of notice and makes of adornment something earthly that weighs gravity in the heaven of illegible longings. Were I lazier or unslept, I’d mention David Lynch, Raymond Carver, Breece D'J Pancake. Not because they are here, but because this unrevealed work is a wrecked and rebuilt ode to the static reappearance of the pieced together piece of the world that shows itself briefly forever to the child who has lied about their age might time get a pass. Maybe they are not lying. From a time machine full of nails, I take no nail. It’s there, it’s there, it’s there.