Guy Elston’s debut, The Character Actor Convention was a highly anticipated book for me personally. Having read bits and pieces of poems from it in the year or two preceding its publication, Elston’s poems always teemed with a certain likeability that I found so central to the manifold personalities portrayed in his strangely wonderful poetics.

It was in no way surprising to hear then, that Elston’s debut collection of poems was titled The Character Actor Convention. Although the book is pearled in the middle, with the poem that lends its title to the book, this title also perfectly encapsulates Elston’s approach to his poetics, where each poem is indeed a “Character actor” in itself. This book is not just a convention, but the best ensemble comedy since It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Most poems in this collection shift the speaking voice to a character often plucked from the strangest corners of current news, or other times from history. From Joan of Arc to lab rats, the truly remarkable feat is Elston’s philosophical scope of inquiry into each character. The characters chosen never “act” in the way the reader expects, creating curiosity and intrigue in their framing; yet, no character is so out of place to render its exploration futile.

King Arthur is doomscrolling on his online social media profile; Joan of Arc is playing chess, clairvoyant to the future that lies ahead; crows and magpies build nests on anti-bird spikes amid feuds with anti-natalist family; and the stick insect begins to philosophize as its physical kinship to its resting place poses an existential question. If these are truly character actors, then Elston is the prodigy director that can make any first-time actor deliver an award-winning performance despite all obstacles.

The Character Actor Convention is a book filled with philosophical investigation into identity. The poem “The Work” is prefaced with the news heading “mushroom learns to crawl / after being given robot body,” and begins with the lines “Our words no longer correspond / to this world” as a response to the very world it is exploring. Where Elston shines is in his ease of movement between the absurd and the profound. “The Work” therefore ends with “Take hear, brave mushroom. It never ends, / until it does.”

The Character Actor Convention is, in the end, a perfect “Collection” of poetry in the true sense of the word. Each poem lives and dies its own microcosm, begins and ends its own narrative, but in elegant, soothing, and yet profound ways. It’s a book that proved to me that the single-page poem is a complete and strong unit of thought, not to be undermined.