Escape from Jersey City by George J. Searles Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

“Escape from Jersey City”
Poetry
Clare Songbirds Publishing House, 2025
$14.99, 106 pages
ISBN: 978-1957221281

The very title of George Searles’s new collection brings a smile to your face with its echoes of B movies at drive-in theaters. If you want one word to describe Searles’ poetry, it might be clever or it might be witty, but I’m going with droll.

There are poems in Escape from Jersey City lampooning the commercialization of everything in modern culture – from “Much Obliged, U.S. Government Printing Office! You Guys Are the Best!” – skewering the avalanche of informational brochures about absolutely everything – to “Starter Resartus,” about the ubiquitous sports jerseys that we see everywhere proclaiming our favorite teams and players –Yankees, Tigers, Dodgers, Lakers, Bulls, Lebron, Kobe, and Patrick Mahomes. Why not something different?

            How about some European words
to make folks turn and stare?
Les Beaux Esprits, the coat could gloat,
or perhaps Chargés d'Affaires. 

            Or the logo could be something
based on literary shticks –
the Joyceans or Pynchonites
or, let’s say, the Moby Dicks.

And then there is “The First Annual AHS Wipeout 5K Run” in the voice of a centenarian, raising money for the cause of hemorrhoids. Not just a good cause, but the runners all receive “another of those coveted plastic trophies.”  Junk culture rules!

Searles amusingly expands on the theme in poems like “Customer Service Has Its Limits” (“You need a laminated, folding street map of Jersey City? / Tell you what I’ll do…”) and “Cultural Differences,” which starts out:

            It’s easy to find fault with how we live
in this country, killing half our time glued,

            as the saying goes, to the television,
watching a bizarre army of extreme sports

            and equally pointless conventional ones,
and wasting the other half scanning our phones

            in garish shopping malls as big as baronies—
faux villages with junk food franchises…

Or take “His Master’s Vice,” a poem from the perspective of a seeing-eye dog who accompanies his blind owner to a sad strip show. This one reads like a metaphor for the whole society!

But as I say, the main word is droll. Searles does not so much condemn modern life as observe it from a humorous perspective. Mortality is very much a part of the mix. We’re all going to die anyway, as Senator Joni Ernst famously said, which may put things in perspective. In “The Golden Years” Searles considers our view of obituaries as time rolls on, originally something we skipped over to read the comics, Beetle Bailey or Dagwood Bumstead, or the sports page. “But at a certain point, when you’re 60 or so…”

            Indeed, the obits, it suddenly seems, could now be mistaken
for a lightly edited page from your high school yearbook,
or maybe even from the book of the class who were freshmen,
mere pipsqueaks, when you were a lordly, immortal senior.

The word “immortal” is poignant in its irony, indeed!  The short poems, “At Sea,” “Post Mortem,” and “Midnight” force the point home.

The big hand is nearly
on the 12.

The little hand is almost
right straight up.

And the Big Hand is reaching
for your throat.

Another poem, “Civil Service,” which again satirizes bureaucracies, is set in the fanciful “Bureau of Death” (at least, I think it’s something imagined!), where a bored government employee makes jokes soaked in gallows humor – whistling past the graveyard – “as the corpses keep arriving, arriving, arriving.” In the poem called “Death,” Searles compares death to the neighborhood bully who used to pick on kids weaker than him. You could always fight back against the bully, who would still end up thrashing you to within an inch of your life, but at least he’d probably leave you alone then, “preferring easier prey instead. But with The Reaper / there can be no appeasing, no fighting back.”

In a couple of poems, both, “Honest Abe” and “Resolution,” set in Jersey City, Searles casts his cynic’s eye on the implicit racism in our society. A token Black kid places a wreath around the neck of the statue of Abe Lincoln as the white citizens pat themselves on the back for not being bigoted, in the first, and in the second, a couple of white kids stranded in a snowstorm on New Year’s Eve are rescued by some Black men, whom they at first assume are there to rob them.

They had no trouble at all lifting my car up, three on each
bumper, returning it to the road, wishing us a Happy New Year,

and sending us back on our way…back into the blinding whiteness.

The title poem also hints at death. It comes with an epigraph from John Updike in a poem about his own hometown of Shillington, Pennsylvania: We have one home, the first, and leave that one. / The having and leaving go on together. In his poem, Searles enjoins the reader (himself?) to get the hell out of Jersey City before it’s too late. The short poem that follows it, “Semper Paratus” (“Always Ready”), reads:

Hey, look, I was a Boy Scout in Jersey City
in the ’50s, so wherever I find myself now
I always remember to look around and wonder,
“What is there here that would be a good weapon

if things go off the rails again?” And also,
“Where is the closest unlocked exit?”
Then I test the door, just to reassure myself,
so I can stop worrying, chill, relax a little.

Chill. Relax a little: this may be the best description of the experience of reading George J. Searles’ droll poems.