The Land of Give and Take / Tyler Farrell

In The Land of Give and Take, Tyler Farrell’s second collection of poems, a variety of characters appear as on a stage: teenagers and grandparents, priests and poets, the wise and the foolish, professors and proles.  Their stories are told by an acute narrator, or often by the characters themselves, and as one poem says, “someone buys the story.”  The reader buys these stories for their authenticity and pathos.  Shadowing many of the poems is a conflicted Catholicism, sometimes resentful of the churches claims, but recognizing that nothing else gives weight and meaning to the lives of these transient personalities.