A label stamped on a ream of printer paper becomes, in Dave Bonta's hands, a kind of prayer. "100% post-consumer" tells you a sheet was made from paper that had already been used and thrown away. The title lends that humble, eco-friendly phrase to a person. Whoever speaks in these five lines wants to be recycled. They don't want to be tidied up or repaired. They want to be burned down and made again.
The poem is built from two commands. "make me a head" is the grammar of a request to a craftsman, a god, or a papermaker, and we never learn which. The head has a strange job: to "let me see where I am". It isn't asked to think or to know, only to show the speaker their own position, as if they are currently lost. Then comes the line break and the poem's best trick: "out of books and hope". "Out of" can mean "made from," so the head is built of books and hope, the way a paper head would be. It can also mean "having run out of," so the speaker is out of books and out of hope. Read the lines straight through and a third meaning appears: the head will show me where I stand once books and hope are gone. The raw material for the new self is exactly what has been used up. That is the logic of recycling, where the spent thing becomes the stuff of the next one.
The second stanza turns from making to unmaking. "use a history of arson / to turn me to ash." The verb "use" is thrifty even about destruction, since nothing goes to waste. Set beside "books" in the stanza before, "a history of arson" invites us to hear echoes of book-burning, though the poem names no particular fire. It could just as well be a personal history of burning things down. The poem also stops at the ash. The title promises recycling, but the remaking is never described, and the reader has to supply it, rather like waiting for something to rise from a fire.
The sound is plain, and a few quiet effects do a lot of work. There is no rhyme and no end punctuation, so the poem trails off rather than closing, and ash doesn't feel like a final full stop. Everything is lowercase except one letter: the "I" in "where I am." The speaker is the only thing standing upright on the page, which makes the wish to be reduced to ash more startling. "Arson" and "ash" share their opening sounds, so the cause is almost audible inside its effect. The h-sounds of "head," "hope" and "history" run a thread between what the speaker longs for and what will undo them. The middle line of the first stanza is the longest and mostly monosyllabic, and it slows to the pace of someone speaking carefully. The last line, "to turn me to ash," is a quick spin of small words that settles on the hush of its final syllable.
Much of the poem's flavour comes from its tone. It is nearly deadpan, borrowing the language of the supermarket shelf for something close to despair. "Post-consumer" implies the speaker has been consumed, used up like a product. "100%" is the absolute, slightly comic certainty of a packaging claim, applied to a self made entirely of what came before, with no virgin material in it. The judgement is only an inference from the imagery, but such a person would be assembled from other people's books and other people's fires.
The poem is significant because it fits so many things into so few words: ecological vocabulary, a bookish inheritance, exhaustion, and a stubborn trace of hope. The speaker says they are out of hope, yet the act of asking someone to "make me" assumes that something might answer. The wordplay also gets the reader to do some recycling of their own. We go back over the same words, "out of books and hope," and find them meaning something new. The poem takes a throwaway label and gives it a surprising amount of feeling.