Mable Buchanan

            Grief is personal—it feels unique, nebulous, irreplicable, irreconcilable with love and vitality. It seems impossible that others could empathize with our grief, much less that there could be hope hiding in its ripples; but the law of truly large numbers, referred to as “improbable probability” in mathematics, dictates that this is the case—that in a large enough sample size, anything that we call outrageous can and will happen.

            Dr. James Kimbrell’s January 2025 collection The Law of Truly Large Numbers leads the reader into a deep lake brewing with memories of loss, intent on reteaching them how to breathe. A Jackson, Mississippi native, Kimbrell conjures a sparkling, highly sensory Southern landscape, and his evocative portrayal of place, rendered with an easy musicality, shines in this portrait of death, life, and ongoingness in the South. Opening with a verse from I Corinthians, Kimbrell makes his thesis clear: grief is not a moment to weather, a pit to climb out from, or a defining wound, but rather a necessary albeit painful lens for opening our understanding, seeing more clearly, and loving more fully.

            The collection is composed of four sections, each presenting loss from a different angle. There are poems that border on nostalgic fossilization, like “Self-Portrait at One Hundred Miles Per Hour,” in which the speaker’s “‘72 Dodge Duster” outruns death “in a golden bondo’d / El Camino that means to nose ahead.”[1] “Meditations on a Bowl Made from the Walnut Tree Upended in Last Year’s Hurricane” humbles this kind of pride in its study of a bowl storying the speaker’s father: if his father were alive, the speaker says, “I think he’d give it / to his AA group that it might brim / with dollar bills,”[2] while in the next world, his father “would’ve hitch-hiked to the dog tracks / with all [its] money.”[3]

Not to say that Kimbrell doesn’t make room for joy—several poems in the collection, most notably “Self-Portrait, Basic Training, Fort Mclellan,” the titular poem “The Law of Truly Large Numbers,” “Making a Turkey Sandwich for Mikhail Baryshnikov,” and the sequence “West Jackson Topography” have comic moments, and even these and other poems’ melancholy beats and unflinching portrayals of injustice and loss are tempered by tender warmth.

            Conflicting moods are held elegantly in tension in the collection, which asserts that, while painful, death, grief, and adversity are channels to a higher experience, a deeper love. Kimbrell employs varied forms to express this throughout the book, and his use of sonnet, haibun, prose poem, and lyric essay especially illuminate the multifacetedness of grief, often by conveying the smallness of a traditional, time-contained human perspective.

            This idea is expressed particularly in the standout poems “Self-Portrait, Basic Training, Fort Mclellan” and “Stanzas from Earth.” The former cheekily stages scenes that would otherwise be harsh with a light and lyrical voice, for example when the speaker bungles a makeshift rifle-painting task. Kimbrell narrates, “A bottle of Liquid Paper for paint, my brush was stiff and dry, splayed like a fanned turkey tail… The numbers dripped down the stocks like milk might run down a windowpane.”[4]

The reader waits in Chaplinesque suspense, which Kimbrell facilitates by juxtaposing the brutal environment of basic training with a sense of dramatic irony: “I did not sprout wings and hover above the barracks. Nor did I challenge Drill Sergeant to a haiku contest,”[5] he writes, as if nodding to the lines at the close of the haibun. Amid the landscape of “grunts getting screamed at” and “shit, shower, and shave, a five-minute affair at best” that drill the precision of the most minute human decisions, Kimbrell’s fascination with and “snap to” human smallness, displayed in the image of the haiku, is where the poem gets its power.

It is apropos that just after visceral depictions of “banging on a garbage can lid… in the dirt of the parade field where we did mountain-climbers and push-ups in the dark, grass still damp to the touch,” Kimbrell smoothly slips from past to future tense and closes on the zoomed-out tableau of

the tower we’d soon

repel down—ants on the run

from a garden hoe.[6]

The most compelling moments in the collection likewise create a moving shift in perspective through endearingly creative imagery, careful pacing, and precisely directed attention.

            In fact, it is with this spirit that Kimbrell closes the collection in “Stanzas from Earth.” This poem pays homage to the preceding works’ motifs in a collage-like list: “night, sleep, junkshop / guitars, telepathic wheat, / sheet metal chicken coops / in the backyards of West Jackson” persist in memory long after the speaker has moved on in multiple senses of the word, looking down on his own “jerry-rigged funeral.”[7] The first movement of the piece invokes traditional images of freedom casted playfully dissonant in juxtaposition with unglamorous West Jackson images, “flying” and “paying no one” shoulder-to-shoulder with “a back hoe in the opera lobby” and “a snot rag in a jewelry shop.”[8] Like these, the speaker argues, even in the afterlife, amid ultimate freedom, one could feel “out of place.”

            He is quick to settle any misunderstandings—the death pictured is no river-crossing, Kimbrell writes, no “overly earnest, embarrassed, if not outright apologetic metaphor / incapable of disguising its own fear, transforming nothing.”[9] Insisting the reader won’t see what they expect in this afterlife, see things as they were on earth, the speaker presents radical acceptance as the path to peace, as “death draws the long straw, just as the afterlife / rides shotgun with its beautiful face in the wind.” Our greatest fear is inevitable; but promise operates in tandem with it, and if our experiences with both don’t transform us, we have missed the point.

            Closing the poem with a lyrical apostrophe defined by its use of anaphora, tributes to West Jackson landmarks and nature, and rhetorical questions, the speaker asks: “If you can’t hold me, what’s all this loving for? / I don’t need a monolith. I need a mojo hand.”[10] The collection’s thesis is back, packaged in Hoodoo: How can we reconcile the impulse toward preservation innate in loving something precious and the impermanence that we also know defines life on earth? Only by diving bravely into both.

Youth, the South, and nature are alive in this collection, as are the improbable gift of joy, the tragic probability of loss, and the improbable probability that we are meant to be enriched by both. Kimbrell might appreciate the improbable fact that his collection would closely precede the Mississippian, chronologically transcendent box office hit Sinners; at any rate, readers who appreciate that film, and anyone with a taste for collard greens, lake swimming, the bigheartedness of small towns, and the bittersweetness of memory will delight in the concretions that make this vivid, lyrical, moving, poetically (not to mention statistically) significant collection sing.

[1] Kimbrell, James. The Law of Truly Large Numbers (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), 67

[2] Kimbrell, 8

[3] Kimbrell, 9

[4] Kimbrell, 31

[5] Kimbrell, 31

[6] Kimbrell, 31

[7] Kimbrell, 80

[8] Kimbrell, 80

[9] Kimbrell, 81

[10] Kimbrell, 82