The Melting Point, Robert Fillman, Broadstone Books, Frankfort, KY, 2025, 84 pages, ISBN 978-1-966677-01-7, $25.00.
The Melting Point by Robert Fillman is a beautiful portrait of a boy becoming a man. Fillman explores the influence of the past on the present and future by examining relationships with fathers, grandfathers, teachers, friends, sons, daughters, wives, and others. The poetry book consists of one introductory poem and five other poetry sections. The introductory poem titled “Sometimes I feel,” sets the tone for the rest of the collection, opening in a sort of tumble:
Sometimes I feel
like a deck of cards with all
the hearts removed. So what’s left?
My father’s spade digging down
to sift through the grubs and stones
of my soul, diamonds my
mother never owned, the club
of an uncle’s blue ribbon
breath poised to beat me into
something better: a shiftless
joker who feels like nothing
suits him, a long list of rules
barely anyone reads, or
just another plastic face
staring up from the table,
hoping for another hand.
Fillman plays with metaphors, using a deck of cards to illustrate the speaker’s relationship with himself and his history. The poem suggests that familial circumstances are uncontrollable and end up shaping, beating individuals into the people they become. The question, “So what’s left?” permeates the whole of Fillman’s poetry collection.
The theme of impending doom and the inevitability of destiny appears throughout The Melting Point, and Fillman weaves rich storytelling with blunt honesty to create personal poems. He encourages readers to confront their own lives and question just how much of their history continues to burn within them—when we’ve reached the melting point, what’s left of us and for us to do?
From writing about a trip to Wawa to pick up ice for an ill wife (“Buying Ice at the Wawa for My Wife”) to a list poem illustrating lessons learned from different teachers (“The Day that Baseball Taught Third Grade”), for Fillman, there is the extraordinary in the mundane. One especially compelling poem describes a conversation between two friends in a traffic jam:
Traffic Jam
This morning
as I drive in a rush
to pick up
my wife’s medication
at Walter’s Pharmacy
I find myself
thinking suddenly
of a friend who asked
if I believe
in Fate,
how he didn’t
scoff at my response,
Such
forgiveness in his voice
when he said the day
might arrive when I
could look back on something
as harmless as a car ride
and count
every shouting driver,
each blazing finger
as an angel
and no longer
see the nothing
in them
and instead
See
all of us as travelers
trying to get across,
his voice floating
Somewhere
between the shining steel
and road,
the engine’s rev
and me.
This poem is just one example of the lyrical voice present in Fillman’s pieces. The phrase, “all of us travelers/trying to get across,” suggests the idea of this collective “us.” Just as we—the narrator, friend, reader—are each on our separate journeys to arrive at some destination, at this current moment, sitting in traffic, we are all suspended together. This poem has one period at the end, almost inviting readers to read it in one breath, thought. Its structure represents the contained, liminal space of a vehicle. It’s almost as though people can only reflect and consider the deeper implications of their everyday routines when forced to stop their current journey, sit in traffic, and pause the rush.
In another poem, the speaker also pauses to consider the sum of their everyday actions:
The Weight of Loss
I don’t hear the doctor at first
when she asks if I’ve been sleeping
better these nights, if I’ve cut back
on the raw fish, if the migraines
have subsided, because my mind
is gridlocked, caught between some weight
and height on the BMI chart
tacked on the wall of her office,
as if my body were hanging
there too.
That’s when I remember
some random bit of trivia,
how the first body mass index
was based on the weights of corpses,
and I laugh at the irony,
how all these years I’ve been striving
to be as fit as a dead man,
controlling portions, passing on
seconds or dessert, forgetting
how much I loved my wife’s brownies,
when she would dump an extra cup
of walnuts into the batter
because she knew I loved the crunch,
when we’d clear dishes together,
clean up our kitchen messes, those
memories so near, I try to
close my eyes around them, savor
my daily allowance of loss
as I try to get back those years
before that disappearing trick,
before I became a walking
Cadaver.
I’m snapped back into
reality when the doctor
presses the stethoscope against
my skin, tells me to breathe, as though
I haven’t been. She asks again
if I’ve been sleeping more soundly
as she slides the cold drum across
the smooth map of my heart, tells me
to breathe deep, and again, and now
to just breathe normally, as if
that request were simple, as if
I have been overthinking it
these last few years, as if my lungs
hadn’t been at work all the while,
toiling against their master’s will.
The line “how all these years I’ve been striving/to be as fit as a dead man” is striking. The speaker grieves his life as he continues to live. Fillman masterfully highlights the reason for living. The line, “toiling against their master’s will,” finishes the poem quite nicely. This “master” may reference the speaker himself, the speaker’s father, the speaker’s father’s father, God, or anyone else, really. Who is the master of our lives, and do we have a say in how our lives and the life we bring into the world turn out?
Fillman answers part of the latter question in another poem:
On a Tuesday, my son and I are screaming
down Splash Mountain at Disney, twelve hundred miles
removed from another mass shooting, this one
at an elementary school in Texas,
though we don’t know about it yet. Ours are screams
of laughter, water spraying in our faces,
which shields us from the midday sun as our flume
steers around minor dangers, bumps the edges
of darkened tunnels, past whimsical vignettes
of cartoon animals, the kind you might spy
in a fourth-grade classroom. We are powerless,
unable to exit, our stomachs turning
with each unexpected drop. But we chose this
terror, and it shows in the ride photograph:
my son’s eyes closed, his arms waving in the air,
a boy just looking happy to be alive.
The poet mentions suffering so close yet far from the father and son, dangers that live all around them, but Fate, possibly, just lets them stay safe from it. The father and son are both one here. No one is below or above the other as they both “are powerless,/unable to exit.” Their lives are in the hands of another greater force. The phrase, “But we chose this/terror” is also interesting. While it literally signifies how the pair chose to ride Splash Mountain, knowing it would be scary, I’m unsure what the symbolic meaning is. In many of Fillman’s other poems, I think he implies that many individuals are powerless in the hands of fate, and their ancestors essentially choose how their lives transpire. But in this poem, perhaps, the greater choice is that of the father for his son. While the narrator’s father controlled his life, this father could choose another destiny for his son. And this son also has a choice for his future son. Still, the poem ends on a more optimistic note, since fate decided to be kind to these two.
Ultimately, the poetry book is centered around a poem about the speaker’s uncle, who lost his job as a welder:
Melting Point
My uncle on the local news
…………….summing up his life
…………….in a thirty-second spot,
his words broken up
…………….and clumsily put back
…………….Together
between noisy, sporadic shots of him
…………….in an apron and helmet,
…………….a pair of leather welding gloves,
the TV reporter cutting him off
to ask what he plans to do now
that the plant has closed, his job
…………….Lost,
not grasping how those words sear
…………….like an acetylene torch
and there I am watching
…………….as a small boy,
seeing the irrevocable destruction
…………….of my kin
from the comfort of my living room,
not knowing the pain
he carried in his head,
…………….his liver,
…………….his fists,
…………….his rifle,
how it’s all there
flashing on the screen
and for a moment transformed
into something useful
…………….and brilliant,
a natural kind of alchemy,
the tears in a middle-aged man’s eyes
…………….about to spark
when the channel suddenly cuts
…………….to commercial—
The uncle never has a chance to say what he wants to. Fillman notes it as “a natural kind of alchemy.” The disparity between the rawness of tears and the artificiality of television is only heightened by the brevity of time as the uncle’s words are clouded by emotion or cut off by the channel. The speaker himself notes how he was only a child and couldn’t have known what was simmering in his uncle’s mind. Yet, now, as the narrator writes with emotional distance, he can understand his uncle’s pain, implying that he knows it because he carries it too.
The Melting Point discusses many complex themes regarding family and a relationship with one’s self. Considering Fillman’s original question, “So, what’s left?” —What’s left in the wake of a tough-loving father and an absent mother? What’s left after these people become stories and these stories haunt the son and his son and his son to come? What’s left for us to do when our pasts are uncontrollable and our fates are inevitable? But even if our lives seem outside of our control, Fillman suggests that we still have a choice. I think the end of “The Day that Baseball Taught Third Grade” sums the narrator’s answer quite well:
………………………………Realizing the afternoon bell
was about to ring, Mr. Buckner closed the day
by gathering everyone around him. He told the class
everyone makes mistakes, that everyone will be
remembered for something, so strive to be good,
above all else, always strive to be good.
The Melting Point is a wildly hopeful poetry collection and a moving read for all.
© Robert Fillman and Ellie Chi
Robert Fillman is the author of House Bird (Terrapin Books, 2022), the chapbook November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019), and his most recent collection The Melting Point (Broadstone Books, 2025). He has received prizes from Sheila-Na-Gig online, Third Wednesday, and The Twin Bill for select poems. He has been a finalist for the Cider Press Review Book Award, the Gerald Cable Book Award, the Sandy Crimmins Prize in Poetry, and the Ron Rash Award in Poetry. Individual poems have appeared in The Hollins Critic, Nashville Review, Paterson Literary Review, Pembroke Magazine, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and others. Fillman earned his Ph.D. at Lehigh University, where he was a Mountaintop Creative Writing Fellow. An Assistant Professor of English at Kutztown University, he currently lives in eastern Pennsylvania.
Ellie Chi decided she wanted to write after a high school English class, where she met the infamous and beloved Holden Caulfield. Based in Maryland and California, she specializes in creative nonfiction and literary fiction. Ellie attended the Yale and Juniper Young Writers Workshops ‘23 and continues her literary endeavors at Pomona College, where she edits for The Lobster: The Claremont Journal of the Humanities and writes as a columnist for The Student Life.
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