A library is supposed to be where knowledge is stored safely, yet Dave Bonta's poem describes its shelves as a kind of rigged marketplace. Nothing in it is calm or reverent. By the end the speaker has turned from the books on the shelves to the ones he writes himself, and he admits he doesn't know what deserves to be fixed between covers. The central idea is a doubt about writing: what is worth making permanent when so much of what is already bound up is worthless, or worse?
The first image is odd and exact: "books of tickets / for pain and trouble." We usually think of books of tickets as raffle strips or bus passes, small slips that buy you entry. Here the thing you gain entry to is suffering, and the word "books" is stretched until the library seems to sell admission to misery. It also suggests the way tickets can be fines, a penalty issued by an authority. The next stanza turns to "books of acceptable answers / like land sold for nothing." The word "acceptable" matters most. These answers are not true or beautiful, only approved, and the simile says they have lost their value. Land sold for nothing is something given away cheaply, perhaps by people who didn't understand what they owned. So the poem hints that the library's official answers have been bought and sold until nothing remains of them.
The third stanza holds the poem's sharpest bit of language: "but how to communicate / excommunication / to the choir." The line breaks let the words grow out of each other. "Communicate" sits alone on one line, and the next line stretches it into "excommunication," so the act of casting someone out literally contains the act of sharing. The phrase "the choir" calls up the saying about preaching to the choir, which is addressing people who already agree with you. The sentence is ambiguous, and I think deliberately. Is the speaker the one being cast out, or is he trying to cast out the acceptable answers? In either case, the problem is that the people who most need to hear it are the ones in unison, singing one approved part. The word "but" at the start of the stanza marks the poem's turn from description to difficulty.
The final couplet changes the scale. After three plural "books of" phrases describing what the library holds, we get "my books of dirt." The repeated structure makes the possessive jump out. Dirt links back to the "land" of the second stanza, and the judgment is a double one. Dirt is what is left when the land has been sold, but it is also soil, where things grow, and it may carry a hint of gossip or scandal. Judging by the imagery, these are rough, earthbound writings that don't fit the library's respectable categories. The verb "bind" belongs to bookmaking, where loose pages are gathered and fixed in place. It also means to restrict or to oblige, and it echoes the church language of the previous stanza, since excommunication is a way of exercising authority over who is bound in or out. The speaker's problem is how to make a book without becoming another institution.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation. That fits its subject, since a poem questioning "acceptable answers" has no use for tidy endings. The short, two-line stanzas are almost like catalogue cards, and the repeated "books of" gives them a chant-like rhythm that builds an inventory. The third stanza breaks the pattern by running to three lines and by its long Latinate words, which slow the reader down just where the idea is hardest. The last line is almost entirely monosyllables: "I do not know what to bind." After the elaborate vocabulary of "excommunication," that plain admission lands heavily, and the poem ends on "dirt," a short, blunt word with nothing ornamental about it.
What makes the poem notable is how much it holds in so little space. In eight short lines it deals with institutions, orthodoxy and the writer's uncertainty. It also refuses to offer an answer of its own, which is the one thing a library of acceptable answers can't give.