Instructions for Burying a Comet

June Sato’s Instructions for Burying a Comet is organized as a sequence of impossible procedures. Poems explain how to fold an eclipse, repair a constellation, interview a crater, and hide a comet beneath an apartment building. The conceit gives the collection immediate personality, blending domestic instruction with astronomical scale. At its best, the book makes grief feel both intimate and physically strange.

Sato has a gift for images that arrive cleanly and resist paraphrase. A saucepan reflects “the one moon we can afford.” A hospital bracelet becomes an orbit that will not close. In one of the strongest poems, a speaker measures a departed sibling’s room by the distance light travels during each remembered sentence. These moments join concept and emotion without requiring explanation.

The collection also experiments intelligently with form. Numbered lists fracture midway, diagrams refuse to label their central objects, and several prose poems hide repeated phrases at measured intervals. The procedures create tension between authority and helplessness: the speaker sounds certain about tasks that cannot be completed. That contradiction gives the early sections a compelling emotional logic.

Across the full book, however, the method begins to feel restrictive. Nearly every experience is translated into stars, planets, gravity, or light. The recurring vocabulary initially creates unity, but eventually it predicts the poems’ movements. A kitchen argument becomes a solar flare; a childhood photograph becomes dark matter; a breakup becomes orbital decay. The metaphors remain polished while the underlying situations lose specificity.

Sato is most affecting when the cosmic framework loosens. A brief poem about sorting screws from a dead parent’s workbench contains no celestial language and carries more weight than several elaborate sequences. Its plainness allows objects and grief to meet directly. Similar restraint would have strengthened the collection’s later sections.

The book’s middle sequence, “Minor Extinctions,” is uneven but ambitious. It considers ecological loss through invented museum labels and future field notes. Some poems sharpen the ethical stakes by attending to particular species and habitats; others rely on generalized apocalypse. The distinction matters because Sato’s writing is strongest when observation precedes symbolism.

The final poem returns to the title’s impossible instruction and earns a quiet resolution. The comet is not buried but watched until it leaves sight, an acknowledgment that ritual may organize loss without containing it. The collection reaches that insight through too much repetition, yet the closing simplicity restores some of the early wonder and reminds us how effective Sato can be when technique yields to attention.

Verdict

Our verdict: A formally playful poetry collection with arresting images, though its repeated cosmic conceits often outpace emotional discovery. At 3.0 out of five stars, it is a mixed but frequently beautiful book whose finest poems suggest a more varied and powerful whole.