Anyone who has finished a gripping novel and then caught themselves thinking in its sentences will recognise the feeling Dave Bonta packs into thirteen words. The title, "Reader's remorse," plays on the familiar "buyer's remorse," the sour second thoughts after a purchase. Here the regret comes after reading. The central idea is that books don't just give us things. They leave something behind in us, and the reader, a little alarmed, wants their own unadorned voice back.
The one image in the poem is its first line: "books like ships with fresh / stowaway selves." Ships carry cargo across distances, and so do books, bringing in voices and minds from elsewhere. But the poem doesn't picture an honest delivery. A stowaway is hidden, unticketed and absent from the manifest. The selves in this poem arrive uninvited, and the reader finds them aboard only afterwards. The poem leaves open whose selves these are. They might be the book's characters and narrators, or new versions of the reader, tried on without permission. The line break adds to the effect. Ending a line on "fresh" lets the word hang for a moment, and a "fresh" ship sounds clean and newly launched. Only "stowaway" turns the freshness into something slightly unsettling. The selves are new, but also cheeky, and not entirely welcome.
The form is as bare as the wish it expresses. There is no capitalisation, no punctuation and no rhyme, and the poem sits in two couplets. The rhythm contracts as it goes. The opening line, with its heavy beats in "books," "ships" and "fresh," is the longest. The lines then shrink to "stowaway selves," then "give me back," then "my plain words." The poem narrows like a door being closed.
The sound work is quiet but deliberate. The first stanza is full of hushing sibilants, in "ships," "fresh," "stowaway" and "selves," which gives the sense of something slipping aboard unnoticed. The second stanza is blunt by comparison, all one-syllable words with firm consonants: "give me back / my plain words." In fact "stowaway" is the only word in the body of the poem longer than a single syllable. The intruder is the one long, sprawling word in a poem of short ones, which suggests that the invasion is felt as a disruption of the poem's own plain rhythm.
The two stanzas also divide the poem by kind of language. The first is figurative, with its simile, its ships and its smuggled passengers. The second is a flat imperative, with no "please," no metaphor and no softening. "Give me back" implies that something has been taken, so the speaker feels robbed, and the ownership claim in "my plain words" is almost childlike. The word "plain" carries a double sense, suggesting both unadorned speech and the straightforward ordinariness of a self before it has been dressed in other people's styles. The poem is addressed to no one in particular, perhaps the books, perhaps the air, and that adds to its half-comic, half-serious tone.
There is also a tension here that makes the poem more than a complaint. The speaker asks for plain words, yet the only way to say what has happened is through a figure, the ship with its stowaways. The poem can't quite do without the borrowed imagination it distrusts. Still, the second stanza proves that plainness is possible, since the request is made in exactly the words it asks for. The poem's form supports its wish, if only briefly.
What makes the poem significant is how much honesty it fits into so small a space. It names an experience that many readers know but seldom admit, that reading is not a harmless pleasure but an exchange in which we are changed, sometimes more than we meant to be. It also stops short of renouncing books. The title says "remorse," not "farewell," and remorse is what you feel about something you did and will probably do again. The speaker wants their own voice back, but the poem keeps the ships in the harbour. Reading is a risk, the poem suggests, and a reader who is regretful may well still be a willing host.