John's Table: Paradox and Process: Review by Sean G. Meggeson

John's Table: Paradox and Process

Review by Sean G. Meggeson

Leslie Lewis' full-length poetry collection, John's Table (Piżama Press, 2026), is an authentic exploration of desperation, loss and tentative hope. Authentic both in its articulation of existential indeterminacies and the hardship of engaging in the ongoingness of hope-finding and hope-holding.  

Lewis skillfully employs a warehouse-simple style that expresses itself in poetic lines that are often complete sentences in themselves. It makes for rhythmical, accumulative reading, creating a kind of careful momentum of emotions, thoughts and observations. 

Lewis' style also feels appropriate for a collection of poems that asks the reader to join her on what seems like a here-and-now life inventory filled with worry, sadness and a kind of quiet bewilderment and anger that sometimes carries with it a barely-accepted resignation over the awareness that life fades and paradoxically goes on as it fades.  

​From "Light":
 
               What we pull from the air has authority.

               If it were more obvious, it wouldn't be sure work to get here.

               Or be here.

               A big outloud sigh.

               The inexpressibles grow when we look at them.

               The spiritual is when we don't know what we are doing.

               There are no revelations, just ongoingness.

               We relish shade in negative spaces.

               We make a kissy face.

               We say "Sorry," but are we?

               Our smarts go soft.

              We kill one bad thing with another.

Then our light fails as it fades, our belief system blown to pieces.

It's important to say that none of what Lewis offers in this collection is nihilistic. Rather, her authentic stance is infused with surprising, human lines like the above, "We make a kissy face." And it's these animating details that are compelling throughout the collection as they add to Lewis' ability to outline the existential conflict between everyday being and negation. As in the final lines of "Light": 
    
               We walk one sentence at a time.

               We unsettle ourselves.

               It is difficult, if not impossible, to care when we don't or not care when we do.

               We are blown away by this incapability.

               We are dumb like the lawn chair in blazing light.
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The detail of the "lawn chair in blazing light" brings the reader into the poem and at the same time leaves them alone outside of the poem witnessing something that is both a relatable experience and one that also alienates the reader witnessing it. In this sense, Lewis' gaze reminds one of painterly composition. Something one might find in Hockney or Fischl whereby space tends to be more of a plane of metaphor than of its own concrete actuality. From "Around":

               Then going farther would be a       
 
               horizontal move and going 

               deeper vertical if we were 

               standing, but we are lying down, 

               so it's the other way around.

As engaging as Lewis' use of spatial metaphors is, she is not merely a poet of a disembodied gaze. Far from it. The poetics of 'looking' Lewis enacts is both object-oriented and humanly dialectic, trying to make sense of self and self-with-other. From "Points":
    
                We look at the situation differently now just as we will look at it differently again.

                Our ideas feel urgently crammed together.

                We have no close, good friends.

                Or neighbors.

                Okay then.

In keeping with Lewis' explorations of existential paradox and indeterminacy, the poem continues:
    
                I cannot save you, but I also won't turn away.

                Isn't kindness just like the touch of the moon on snow or a fever?

                Here is the truth that snow cover brings: that what's underneath matters less than before.

                The present is nothing to be in.

                Out of nowhere life seems okay. 

Lewis unapologetically, and I will add courageously, explores the brutalities of human indeterminacy and paradox but in contradiction to how less mature poetry might collapse into desperation, Lewis maintains what to me feels like a needed and realistic survey of hope, and if not the attainment of hope, at least the question of one’s ability to mentalize it. Even in the face of anxiety, depression and death, the question of hope remains real for Lewis. From "Again":
    
                You don't want to be who you are.

                Then along comes a man playing a guitar.

                 You dance.

                 And it is a great day!

                Your keys and wallet and phone get intentionally lost so they too can experience the joy of being found again.

The word "joy" stands out as a hard-won reality in John’s Table, something that comes from a poetic dedication to the process of the multi-layered articulation of human experience. Lewis implies how even though we all might long for common avoidances of pain and loss, she offers a contemporary and necessary articulation of a process of life engagement that does not land in easy conclusions, but rather engages in a complex process. She claims a sense of hope, if only provisionally. As in "Fat": "We're good now, not good as in not great, but good as in very good. / We glue the artist's head back on her body." 

And, in "Hand-Me Downs":

               My life is an ant in the silverware drawer.

               It's not greatness I'm after.

               I'm a small question.

               I'm good.

              Is there anything I could take to feel this good all the time?

It’s not a yes or no question. The question offers temporary hopeful affirmation while at the same time points to unavoidable indeterminacy that admits loss. The question quietly asks for interaction--and somehow at the same time the reader gets the sense that it's okay if they don't interact. The paradox between interaction—and what…listening, witnessing?—feels implicit throughout John’s Table. We can eat from the table, or not. It’s okay, it’s okay. There’s a lot of pain in personal interactions, you know. A lot of pain in this life of people and their limitations, their irrevocable movements toward endings. 

​John’s Table stayed with me long after reading, and still has me asking myself when was the last time I sensed this kind of wisdom and respect for the human in contemporary poetry?   


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Sean G. Meggeson is a poet and audio/spoken word artist, living in Toronto. He has been published in a range of journals and magazines, including Antiphony, Bruiser, and the Journal of Experimental Practice . Forthcoming: a full-length poetry collection, j: poems (primitive press, 2026) as well as two spoken word & soundscape albums, Say Please and Liminal Animal. His audio work can be found on Bandcamp and Spotify. Sean is poetry co-editor of Blood+Honey. https://seangmeggesonpoetry.blogspot.com/
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