“'In Transit' is the title of three poems interspersed throughout Michael Mirolla's The House on 14th Avenue. The first, subtitled 'Primary Colours,' begins the book. Itself in three parts, it cleverly outlines the death of the speaker's father with compact, powerful monologues narrated by unique medical paraphernalia, such as 'the hip screw-plate' and 'the leg brace.' The verbs at the ends of early lines such as 'the ghost limb sings' (part 1) and 'the bedpan laughs' (part 2) reappear in the third part, 'Passage,' at the conclusion of a repeated line, 'the incandescent word/that will make him sing' ('sing' then replaced by 'respond,' 'moan,' 'laugh,' 'chant,' and 'echo'), concluding 'that will make him inscribe/that will make me real.' This foregrounds the movement to be taken by the speaker in bringing his father (and mother) to life through many more journeys, past, present and future.

The prelude of 'Inventory III: Fibonacci's Abacus,' 'the worlds awake/as prehensile thumbs/clutch a writing tool,' closely resembles Seamus Heaney's revelatory equating of his pen to his father's shovel, his epipanic 'I'll dig with this.' ('Digging' is one of three epigraphs.) In 'Portrait,' the speaker nails his mother to a wall, where 'Slightly tilted,/[she] hangs/smiling.' In another poem he has 'her pionied/against the page, a new-born creature who is/and is not my mother,' the amphibian nature of his parents running throughout the text.

...Mirolla is excellent with lists and clever elisions, such as 'grim (f)utility.' In the poems about his dead father, I was reminded of Sharon Old's The Father and her earlier works, particularly 'I Go Back to May 1937,' in which she visualizes her parents meeting for the first time, wishes on some level that they had never met, but realizes that she would then have not been born. Her poem ends with a [wo]manifesto: 'do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.' Mirolla's comparable poem, 'The Honeymoon (1946),' is less self-focused, questioning the reality of what he wants to expose: 'An image within a composite/within a poster...' If Heraclitus cannot step in the same river twice, Mirolla is in the same boat, to use a metaphor less skillful than his.

Poems about the father as POW are rich, with allusions to Tiresias/Oedipus, Escher, Proust, Plato, Homer (one of the three epigraphs is from The Iliad), Heraclitus, and others. 'Googling 40 Kilos' (the weight his father said he has shrunk to) is a found poem that reads like code. 'The Vanishing Man...at 95' shows how malleable story is, that at such Judeo-Christian significant occasions as '(Easter, I think)' and '(Christmas Eve, perhaps),' memory is tentative, slippery, his father's weight while in a concentration camp changing with each telling. The speaker 'feel[s] the urge to remind him/it hd been "40 kilos, skin plus bones"/the time before,' but then asks, 'But who am I to break the spell? To halt/the shrinkage?'”

— Crystal Hurdle Event