To call Midway an elegiac work is both understatement and truism. Kayla Czaga’s literary examination of paternal loss merits all the breadth she grants it and moves thoughtfully into her equally-inquisitive variations on sadness in the speed of contemporary life. From her cheeky but tonally accurate rewrite of Emily Dickinson’s conversations with Death to a trip to the Underworld, Czaga picks up the thread of mourning where her last collection, 2019’s Dunk Tank, left off. Midway’s melancholic address concerns not only the lost father in all his ragged beauty, but also the middle-aged speaker herself.

“Midway this life we’re bound upon, / I woke to find myself in a dark wood” begins Dante’s Divine Comedy. To be midway—between yet striving for balance—demands emotional exactitude. What does anyone have to show for their years on earth? A photo of a carnival midway graces the book’s cover: an image combining joy and confusion, sensory overload and immediate gratification, strange light beckoning on a darkened hilltop. The book’s eponymous poem reimagines that carnival midway as a redemptive space that “arrives for the father.” Czaga’s repetition of the words “impossible,” “wrong,” and “problems” veers toward a pantoum form before deftly dodging that form’s use of repeated lines that can too often signal resignation.

Bristling with pop culture references, Midway examines personal grief as necessarily steeped in an era’s ephemera. In her Dantean descent into the Underworld, especially in the poem “Rules for Living,” the daughter-speaker cautions herself to remember the rules of what can be eaten, drunk, or touched in the land beyond. The long poem “The Power of Love” tracks the speaker through her earthly discomfort to the land of Hades in order to find her father, whose words of wisdom are few but pointed, not meant to be any more—or any less—poignant than a power ballad. Blending the everyday with the ancient, Czaga gives Midway the breadth of the possible and the depth of the likely.

An essential part of Czaga’s signature poetics blends the fantastic with the quotidian; on the back cover of Midway, poet Ed Skoog notes that the book contains “sadly little actual dinosaur erotica,” perhaps recalling Dunk Tank’s “Tender Like Beverly Tender”:

imagine
a convincing rising action between Tanis,
a lonely farm girl, and a ripped, impossibly
resurrected Allosaurus named Big Al,
who works on oil rigs.

It’s rare to see my given name appear in a work of literature, especially romantically linked to a giant lizard, albeit a well-employed one. But naming takes on special importance in Midway, particularly in “I Go Back to November 1989,” in which Czaga’s parents delay naming her for days, determined to choose the right name and welcome her to the world. The Greeks considered it unlucky to utter the name of Hades, using “Pluto,” the wealthy one, as an epithet to evade loss. But in Midway, Czaga ushers us into the Underworld and leads the way. Follow her down; she knows all the good paths.