Poetry review –THE HUMAN CORE: Charles Rammelkamp finds a convincing account of human motivations in this lively collection by Wade Stevenson
The Human Core
Wade Stevenson
BlazeVOX [books], 2026
ISBN: 978-1-60964-542-7
$18.00 66 pages
Wade Stevenson concludes the poem, “Our Sunflower Amor,” from his new collection:
You and me together in our sun Amor,
In the evening shadows of our sun Amor.
We make love in the shadow of our human core.
This echoes a previous poem from In the Country of the Peregrine, “A Home At Last,” in which he assures the traveler on the great journey that is our life:
There’s a final refuge for you –
A home in the heart of the Sun Amor
In all of his previous collections, In the Country of the Peregrine, Love at the End, The Departure Sonatas among them, Stevenson extols the magnificence of Amor, the life-sustaining love at the heart of life’s journey, an all-encompassing force at the human core, that includes the platonic, the erotic, the spiritual aspects of love, the motivation that gives life its meaning. The word appears in seventeen of the fifty poems in The Human Core, from the third poem, “My Indigo Amor,” to the penultimate poem, “Written in the Air” (‘It’s all thanks to the magician of Amor’). Subtly, in his new collection, Stevenson locates this life force at the human core, and hence the book’s title.
In the title poem, Stevenson introduces the concept of moments, the atomic units of becoming, the building blocks of experience and existence. He begins the poem with a mystical question:
When does a moment
Become a moment?
When it ceases to be
The moment it was,
Has not yet become
The moment it will be.
The moments, he asserts, are “Tightly wound around the human core.” One astute critic notes that the word “core” comes to us from two Latin words, “cor,” which means “heart” and “corps,” which means “body.” Indeed, heart and body are key reference points in Wade Stevenson’s work.
“One Moment In Time” (‘Gathering moments — your life! / Threading them together…’), “In The Moment” (‘Keep the moment, / Be the moment…’), and “The First Moment” all emphasize the miniature experiences, durations in time, that collectively sum up our lives. “The First Moment” begins:
There was once a moment,
A moment among many moments,
Moments and moments and moments,
You felt it, knew it, embraced it,
Your sun-flared moment in time…
In the poem “Your Memory Match” Stevenson alludes to Marcel Proust whose A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is famously all about recovering the past, triggered by the taste of the moist, spongy madeleine. Stevenson ends this poem, ‘You hunt the meat of the moment
What you really loved was always other,
Out of reach and of time. You’re condemned
To live again the Amor buried in your mind.
There’s a deep philosophical theme involved in this focus on individual moments, their stringing together, their adding up. Proust’s uncle, Henri Bergson, coined the term Élan vital to describe the vital impetus or life force, so much like Stevenson’s Amor. Bergson’s arguments were likewise devoted to the processes of immediate experience and intuition. And then there was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the German idealist, who argued that becoming was the synthesis of being and nothingness. In the poem “A Little Bit About ‘Be’” Stevenson writes:
A going keeps going as far as the eye can see
Until go ceases to be, merges into becoming,
And becoming becomes the goal…
Wade Stevenson’s lyricism should not go unmentioned. In the verse cited above from “Your Memory Match” you simply absorb the internal rhyme of “time” and “mind” without particularly noting it as you would an end-rhyme, say, his melodious, euphonious assembly of words. And of course the reader notes the rhyme of “amor” and “core.” But Stevenson is also playful with words. “My Sex Poem” is a delight to read:
Gogirl
Seasister
Moonrip
Bellyripe
Fruitbite
Breastrise
Hipswell
Archedback
Tremorthighs
Legssplit
Eyeswide
Lunarlook
Tonguetied
Lovewild
Slipperyslide
Inout
Moangroan
Cockride
Increasingly, toward the end of this marvelous collection, Stevenson’s poems contain vital questions. “My Past, For A Trade” opens, ‘Would you like to live in my past?’ Again, he is concerned here with “moments.” “A Little Bit About ‘Be’” begins, ‘Want to know more about me?’ It is likewise focused on “becoming” and the moments that lead there. “My Desiderata,” “About The Birth Of A Poem,” “Being Here Now,” “The Radiance Within,” “Here It Comes,” “How to?” and “Shall I?” all contain questions directed to the reader as well as to the poet himself. But it is “The Human Question” that strikes the “core,” so to speak, of his inspiration. Stevenson starts by asking, ‘Have I finally become / Who I’ve always been?’ This question naturally begs, ‘Who was I before?’ The poet does not provide the answers. That’s the reader’s job. The poem ends:
One last thing I live for,
Before it’s time for me to go,
Is to know who I really am
At the human core.
If there is an answer to the riddle of existence, in the teleological sense of a fulfillment of being, Stevenson offers this from “After The War, Again”:
All that matters is the love you feel
The love that binds
The love that burns
The love that remains
Thus, we come again to Amor. It is truly central to The Human Core.
Oct 3 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Wade Stevenson
Poetry review –THE HUMAN CORE: Charles Rammelkamp finds a convincing account of human motivations in this lively collection by Wade Stevenson
The Human Core
Wade Stevenson
BlazeVOX [books], 2026
ISBN: 978-1-60964-542-7
$18.00 66 pages
Wade Stevenson concludes the poem, “Our Sunflower Amor,” from his new collection:
You and me together in our sun Amor,
In the evening shadows of our sun Amor.
We make love in the shadow of our human core.
This echoes a previous poem from In the Country of the Peregrine, “A Home At Last,” in which he assures the traveler on the great journey that is our life:
There’s a final refuge for you –
A home in the heart of the Sun Amor
In all of his previous collections, In the Country of the Peregrine, Love at the End, The Departure Sonatas among them, Stevenson extols the magnificence of Amor, the life-sustaining love at the heart of life’s journey, an all-encompassing force at the human core, that includes the platonic, the erotic, the spiritual aspects of love, the motivation that gives life its meaning. The word appears in seventeen of the fifty poems in The Human Core, from the third poem, “My Indigo Amor,” to the penultimate poem, “Written in the Air” (‘It’s all thanks to the magician of Amor’). Subtly, in his new collection, Stevenson locates this life force at the human core, and hence the book’s title.
In the title poem, Stevenson introduces the concept of moments, the atomic units of becoming, the building blocks of experience and existence. He begins the poem with a mystical question:
When does a moment
Become a moment?
When it ceases to be
The moment it was,
Has not yet become
The moment it will be.
The moments, he asserts, are “Tightly wound around the human core.” One astute critic notes that the word “core” comes to us from two Latin words, “cor,” which means “heart” and “corps,” which means “body.” Indeed, heart and body are key reference points in Wade Stevenson’s work.
“One Moment In Time” (‘Gathering moments — your life! / Threading them together…’), “In The Moment” (‘Keep the moment, / Be the moment…’), and “The First Moment” all emphasize the miniature experiences, durations in time, that collectively sum up our lives. “The First Moment” begins:
There was once a moment,
A moment among many moments,
Moments and moments and moments,
You felt it, knew it, embraced it,
Your sun-flared moment in time…
In the poem “Your Memory Match” Stevenson alludes to Marcel Proust whose A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is famously all about recovering the past, triggered by the taste of the moist, spongy madeleine. Stevenson ends this poem, ‘You hunt the meat of the moment
What you really loved was always other,
Out of reach and of time. You’re condemned
To live again the Amor buried in your mind.
There’s a deep philosophical theme involved in this focus on individual moments, their stringing together, their adding up. Proust’s uncle, Henri Bergson, coined the term Élan vital to describe the vital impetus or life force, so much like Stevenson’s Amor. Bergson’s arguments were likewise devoted to the processes of immediate experience and intuition. And then there was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the German idealist, who argued that becoming was the synthesis of being and nothingness. In the poem “A Little Bit About ‘Be’” Stevenson writes:
A going keeps going as far as the eye can see
Until go ceases to be, merges into becoming,
And becoming becomes the goal…
Wade Stevenson’s lyricism should not go unmentioned. In the verse cited above from “Your Memory Match” you simply absorb the internal rhyme of “time” and “mind” without particularly noting it as you would an end-rhyme, say, his melodious, euphonious assembly of words. And of course the reader notes the rhyme of “amor” and “core.” But Stevenson is also playful with words. “My Sex Poem” is a delight to read:
Gogirl
Seasister
Moonrip
Bellyripe
Fruitbite
Breastrise
Hipswell
Archedback
Tremorthighs
Legssplit
Eyeswide
Lunarlook
Tonguetied
Lovewild
Slipperyslide
Inout
Moangroan
Cockride
Increasingly, toward the end of this marvelous collection, Stevenson’s poems contain vital questions. “My Past, For A Trade” opens, ‘Would you like to live in my past?’ Again, he is concerned here with “moments.” “A Little Bit About ‘Be’” begins, ‘Want to know more about me?’ It is likewise focused on “becoming” and the moments that lead there. “My Desiderata,” “About The Birth Of A Poem,” “Being Here Now,” “The Radiance Within,” “Here It Comes,” “How to?” and “Shall I?” all contain questions directed to the reader as well as to the poet himself. But it is “The Human Question” that strikes the “core,” so to speak, of his inspiration. Stevenson starts by asking, ‘Have I finally become / Who I’ve always been?’ This question naturally begs, ‘Who was I before?’ The poet does not provide the answers. That’s the reader’s job. The poem ends:
One last thing I live for,
Before it’s time for me to go,
Is to know who I really am
At the human core.
If there is an answer to the riddle of existence, in the teleological sense of a fulfillment of being, Stevenson offers this from “After The War, Again”:
All that matters is the love you feel
The love that binds
The love that burns
The love that remains
Thus, we come again to Amor. It is truly central to The Human Core.