Trying to Catch a Flame in this Windstorm at the End of the World by Steve Henn (Arroyo Seco Press)
Steve Henn’s Trying to Catch a Flame in this Windstorm at the End of the World is a raw, funny, and unflinchingly human collection that feels like both personal diary and public confession. The poems here — rooted in working-class Midwestern life, fatherhood, teaching, addiction, recovery, and regret — burn with self-awareness and unguarded compassion. Henn’s voice, conversational yet precise, recalls the honest music of Philip Levine and the irreverent vulnerability of Tony Hoagland, but with a distinctly Hoosier accent and an eye for the absurd holiness of everyday failure.
From the opening poems, Henn sets a tone of intimate exhaustion and reluctant gratitude. In “On a Day I’m Wondering What the Hell is the Point Anyway?” the narrator drifts through middle age and midcareer, confessing to “coasting toward retirement like / a twelve-year-old on a longboard.” The humor doesn’t mask despair — it illuminates it. Even as he prays for his former student to find satisfaction and family, he seems to be trying to convince himself that such grace still exists. Henn’s plainspoken diction and emotional clarity give the poem its moral weight; this is poetry that risks sincerity without sentimentality.
The collection’s recurring subject is self-reckoning. “Autobiography of My Body” turns the body into both confessor and accuser. The poem’s catalog of physical and moral scars — addiction, loneliness, self-abuse — culminates in a moment of bruised comedy:
“I would like to say thank you to my body / for enduring all my stupidity… / But my body would probably / be like, Ha. Yeah, right. Anytime, fucko.”
That balance of tenderness and dark humor typifies Henn’s gift: he can laugh without letting himself off the hook.
Elsewhere, the poet channels Frank O’Hara’s urban exuberance into small-town critique. “Hail Mary (after Frank O’Hara)” exhorts mothers to “take your boys to the library!” in a world where the alternative is ignorance, violence, or online misogyny. The poem’s manic, satiric energy riffs on O’Hara’s playfulness while grounding it in contemporary dread — the fear that empathy is an endangered species.
Henn is also unsparing in his memory of cruelty and complicity. “A Small Reckoning or Bob-O-Matic” is a devastating parable about boyhood meanness and adult remorse, told through a prank on an underpaid janitor. The poem exposes how humiliation becomes a form of inheritance; the boys’ laughter “was just beginning to get warm,” an image that captures the birth of cruelty with chilling precision.
The later poems, such as “Letter to My Eldest Children” and “Dissociation,” deepen the book’s emotional arc. Henn writes to his children with an aching honesty about alcoholism, loss, and guilt, seeking some fragile redemption in the act of telling. The elegy for his wife and the lightning-struck tree that “went on living” is the book’s quiet miracle—a testament to survival, if not salvation.
Even the poems of daily absurdity, like “Slurry Cleanse,” with its hilarious description of a barroom conversation about detox rituals, reveal an undercurrent of loneliness: the speaker laughs loudly to fill the silence of an empty house. That loneliness is never self-pitying—it’s the space where reflection happens.
By the final poems, Henn’s vision turns almost mystical. “While Birds Sing” gestures toward transcendence, imagining “something behind the puzzle / pieces, something constant, / and comforting,” as if the poet has reached a fragile détente with the universe. The shimmer he sees across backyards and trees is both metaphor and miracle—the flicker of connection that persists “in this windstorm at the end of the world.”
Arroyo Seco Press has given us a book that feels necessary: blue-collar, big-hearted, and brutally self-aware. Henn writes like a man taking stock before the light fades—funny, furious, and still, somehow, faithful. Trying to Catch a Flame in this Windstorm at the End of the World isn’t just a collection of poems; it’s a record of endurance, a late-life prayer whispered into the noise of contemporary America.
Trying to Catch a Flame in thie Windstorm at the End of the World is available on Amazon.
While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan. In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
