Joseph Campana’s The Book of LIFE sets itself a tall order. Pilfering details from old collections of LIFE magazine, it looks at LIFE the way LIFE looked at the American century, trying to penetrate the glossy sheen that the magazine made famous. It picks up in the Depression of 1936 and lands the reader in 1972, with a space program that points towards an ambiguous and uncertain future.

The book unfolds in three sections. Small aperture logos bookend shorter poems and mark the divisions, reminding the reader of the cameras and visual mechanisms that made the original LIFE possible. The Book of LIFE is not so much a reproduction as a remix of those methods. At times, it can select its images from the pages of LIFE to enliven the characters and personalities present in the still photographs and impersonal stories of the magazine, as in “Late in ‘38”:

There is no woman
on page fifty-six.
There are only
images of faces
designed to inflame.

There is a formal regularity to The Book of LIFE that lends its poems the column-friendly prosaic feeling of magazine features. Many of its poems have no stanza breaks and relatively even line-lengths, even if they have no actual meter. A few scatter across the page, like “Meanwhile the World,” where the death of Gandhi and the legacy of the atom bomb have blown the words apart:

beautiful thought:
the wheel will
hold back rage,
these bodies now
one, the linked arms,
the singular kiss.

19.

Meanwhile the world:
everything burning,
everything turning,
wheel that will not end.

Between the historical visions of Parts I & III, Part II is a glimpse into a childhood that begins too late to have lived the events that the rest of the book narrates. It contains “poems of the life that began in the wake of the end of LIFE as Americans knew it and, in some equally improbable way, the end of America as LIFE knew it,” as Joseph Campana writes in the book’s notes.

The last section, spanning 1962–1972, returns to the adult concerns of a nationwide periodical, feeling sober and mature set against childhood. Its treatment of the Northeast blackout of 1965 in “Blackout” is a gentle love poem comparing the lover’s body to the Northeastern geography affected by the blackout. Bringing to mind the New York blackout of 1977 and its images of urban chaos, The Book of LIFE is solid and dignified. Its world is not so disruptive as the “Scream of beginnings” in its first poem, “First Issue,” might try to impress on the reader with blocks of magazine prose. As a book, it is a unified project, a journey deep into the archive that constructed the 20th century for readers everywhere. Joseph Campana has a lot of love for this archive, for its photographs, and for the possibilities its images represent. The Book of LIFE is another way of interpreting these images, an alternative vision of childhood and nationhood, a camera obscura showing us JFK upside down.