Before Leaving the Island

John Fadely’s Before Leaving the Island is a poetry collection that trusts image, movement, and atmosphere more than explanation. The book is divided into four sections: Shores, Terrain, Subterranea, and Shoals. It moves through sea edges, urban drift, bodily injury, memory, and estrangement with a restless, searching intelligence. Fadely’s poems often begin in the physical world, waves, lava fields, rain-slick streets, reef life, a bike crash, and then tilt into something more philosophical, asking how identity is made, damaged, named, and carried forward.

What makes this collection great is its alertness to place. These are not generic nature poems. Maui, Front Royal, Paris streets, Victoria Peak, pavement after rain, and the shifting line between shore and self all feel closely observed. Even the more conceptual poems stay tethered to tactile things: yellow butterflyfish over reef water, a shattered elbow replaced with surgical metal, a White Pages entry that becomes a meditation on contact and absence. Fadely also lets technology into the collection without flattening it, with titles like “AutocompleteBiography” and “Instructions for Fixing Your Technology” widening the book’s sense of modern dislocation. Some readers will find the poems abstract or elliptical, especially when the associative leaps come quickly. But for readers willing to stay with that uncertainty, Before Leaving the Island offers real rewards. It is a thoughtful, image-rich collection that treats the natural world, the body, and the mind as unstable but deeply connected terrain.