Turning the proverbial page in his career from his long-time stint on Supernatural, Misha Collins is entering a new era of creativity by revisiting old ones in his debut poetry collection Some Things I Still Can’t Tell You. While Collins has published standalone poems and been featured in literary journals such as California Quarterly and Columbia Poetry Review, this compendium marks his first comprehensive collection of poetry.
To lay all my cards on the table, I’m by no means a poetry buff. In fact, while beautiful, the superfluously flowery language that’s typical of some poetry has often left me feeling bereft — not necessarily due to a lack of understanding of the text, but a lack of emotional connectivity. The style that Collins writes in isn’t overly loquacious, and that’s what I like about it. Its beauty lies in its simplicity; it’s direct, yet accessible.
However, don’t mistake this simplicity for banality. Every poem in the collection is so clearly infused with emotion and layered with meaning. The pieces leave fans with the ability to gain insight into Collins’ life while simultaneously seeing themselves and their own experiences plastered on the page. This collection of poems is a cobbled-together tribute to the every day, a candid look into moments in Collins’ life and the lens that he views it through. It’s an organized hodgepodge of the roller coaster of ups and downs one experiences in life.
Some Things I Still Can’t Tell You is an exploration of the mundane, finding beauty, finding meaning, finding emotion in the smallest of moments. It’s an ode to the human experience as seen through Collins’ niche adventures. Snapshots of his life spill out onto the page as Collins allows the reader to see and feel and sense what he experienced in these moments. And even while reading about these specific events and episodes in his life, the reader is able to imbue the work with their own interpretation by conveying themes common to the human experience, therefore allowing readers to find connections and insight into their own lives.
By the time you’ve finished Some Things I Still Can’t Tell You, you’ll have traversed a myriad of points on the spectrum of human emotion. You’ll have laughed, you’ll have cried. You’ll have sighed longingly and felt the acute heartache that Collins paints a picture of and mirrors through his prose. Joy, sadness, grief, yearning. Reverence, loss, emptiness, disquietude. And wonder. An ever-present sense of marvel at the world around you regardless of the circumstances.
This set of poems, burned onto the page with the ink of a pen, woven, bound, and threaded together by an evocative sense of vulnerability, serves as a reminder to simply stop and be present above all else. A love letter to life, it reminds one to be present enough in your life to truly live it. To let the emotions wash over you, to find the extraordinary in the supremely ordinary. To feel the sun on your skin, and the burn in your legs. To let the grief crack your heart open, and to let that space fill with new highs and lows and triumphs and sorrows. To simply live and appreciate the living.
And while it briefly touches on the deeply unsettling questions that plague humanity like “Why am I here?”, “Where am I going?”, and “What do I have to say?”, the questions that push us to always aspire to be more, it never fails to remind us to bask in the tumultuous chaos of existence — emotional complexities, joyous simplicities, and all.
Misha Collins’ debut poetry collection is one that you truly won’t want to put down. Some Things I Still Can’t Tell You releases on October 12. The book is currently available for purchase/pre-order now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Indie Bound, Books-A-Million, and Bookshop. As always, stay tuned for more updates on Collins’ work.
