A dish of tripe is not what most of us picture when we think of books, and that is why the opening of Dave Bonta's "Books in the road" startles. The books lie on a "dull road" like something spilled: pale, slippery, faintly repulsive, a stomach lining served up and then dropped on the tarmac. The next line darkens the joke: "a meal of ill conception." It plays on "ill-conceived", the usual phrase for a bad plan, but "conception" also means the beginning of a child or an idea. The line seems to ask whether something went wrong at the very start, either in the books themselves or in the habit of feeding people on them.
The word "ill" then returns. The second stanza gives us a clerk "who tells me ill things", and now the word means bad news and perhaps sickness. That repetition is the poem's quiet stitching. It carries us from food to a bureaucrat to a body, and the third stanza arrives at a surgeon "at a loss / what to do with her own body." The reversal is neat and unsettling. A surgeon's whole expertise is knowing what to do with bodies, yet here she is helpless in her own. The tripe of the opening now looks like a forewarning, since innards are a surgeon's raw material. The phrase "at a loss" is placed at the end of its line, so the reader feels the loss before reaching the explanation. Both the clerk and the surgeon are people we trust to handle our records and our flesh, and both are shown failing. The only "me" in the poem sits on the receiving end of the clerk's news.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme, and in the text as supplied there are no capitals or full stops, so the poem has no formal sense of beginning or ending. The rhythm is speech-like and mostly monosyllabic. "Books in the dull road" puts two heavy stresses side by side in "dull road", and the line trudges, as if the road were making the reader slow down. Sound ties the lines together more than rhyme does: the d of "dull" and "dish", the l running through "meal", "ill" and "loss". The repeated "books for" works like a litany, or like a dedication page read aloud. The word "for" is a clever hinge because it can mean "dedicated to", "meant as medicine for" or "served as food for", and the poem never says which.
The stanzas also hold a small surprise. Three couplets set up a steady pattern, and then the poem ends on a single line: "for the bears." The pattern is broken just where the subject changes. Bears do not hold appointments, fill in forms or go under the knife. Judging by the imagery, they are also the creatures most likely to eat whatever lies in a road. That brings back the tripe and gives the books an unexpected use as food for something that does not mind a meal of ill conception. Another reading is that the bears are the one audience who cannot be let down by words. The poem leaves both possibilities open and gives no verb to settle them, so the sentence trails off into the woods.
That openness is what makes the poem worth reading. In a few dozen words it turns books from a source of comfort into debris, then into an offering. It gathers up people whom human expertise has failed and sends the books past them to something wild. The tone is dark but not despairing, because the humour of the tripe simile keeps cutting into the grief. The poem never explains what books are good for, and the gap between its last line and any answer is where the reader has to do the thinking.