The pleasure of reading Everyone Coming Toward You, David Petruzelli’s new book of poetry and the winner of the Tupelo Press Judge’s Prize, is akin to the small pleasure of stumbling across a packet of old letters and photos that belongs to someone else. At first, filled with mild curiosity, you think you’ll just flip through for a bit, and the next thing you know, an hour has passed and you’re still hunched in the attic, sneezing dust and reading. Like someone else’s letters, these poems are unassuming, anecdotal, and yet marked by moments of startling universal familiarity. The oft-quoted blurb for this book describes Petruzelli’s poems as “the stories you might hear from the guy on the next bar stool, if that guy had a poet’s way with insight and language.” Petruzelli’s strength is indeed his knack for the anecdotal, but I might alter the comparison slightly to say that these poems are more like the tales you’d hear from an older relative after a couple beers some summer evening if that relative had an eye for well-observed detail and a perfect sense for when to taper off into silence.

If my predictive powers are intact, then I will venture that “accessible” will be the adjective most often used in describing Petruzelli’s collection. This particular tag, of course, can be fraught with connotative peril for the author in question—is this actually a subtle put-down, a euphemistic dismissal indicating a lack of sophistication? Or is it accessible as in deeply universal, in the way that Billy Collins’ work might be described as accessible? When I use it to describe Petruzelli’s work, I veer more towards the latter. The poems are Collins-like in their unstagey-ness. Similar to Collins, he is the casual poet-as-common-man, unhurried and unpretentious, more interested in the narrative at hand than in elaborate rhyme or meter. Petruzelli is conversational, not flashy, and almost deceptively slow moving until the reader suddenly flinches at a slowly-built realization. Then—silence. Like a composer using rest notes at the end of a movement, Petruzelli knows how to use what is left unsaid.

The differences, of course, include the fact that Petruzelli is less overtly clever, offers fewer of the closing couplet zingers, than Collins (who is surely the insight-sniper of modern poetry, lulling his readers into a conversational complacency and then, pop!) At his worse, Petruzelli’s lines are prosaic or merely plain. He is not always a poet of verve or sparkle; not one to throw it all onto one deliciously-crafted image or turn-of-phrase. His poems take few risks; are never the kind of elaborate structures that teeter so painfully and gorgeously that they threaten to break. Instead, Petruzelli’s pacing stays slow and steady, and his closings are ruminative rather than startling.

Part of what makes Petruzelli’s poems so eerily familiar is his preoccupation with childhood and its myths. Thunderstorms, seeing another girl and her father when you’re ten, the deaths of elementary school teachers, and parental myth form the substance of this book. Petruzelli is memory-haunted, and his sense of childhood is still incredibly fresh. Perhaps the strongest poem of the book, the poem from whence he gets his title, is the final one, “Hallway,” which ends thus: “When I talk about remembering,/this is what I mean: a hallway in a school,/ where one girl smiles hello/ before her friends carry her off/ triumphantly, with the sound of bells,/ and everyone coming towards you.” Endings like this, much like the thunderstorms Petruzelli also writes about, capture a feeling somewhere in between fear and nostalgia. There is something ambivalent and at times vaguely threatening in Petruzelli’s memory-haunted anecdotes.

Petruzelli’s writing is memorable in its understatement. His candor is almost chilling at times, as in the opening to “What I Do to Them”: “By the time I entered high school/ I had two teachers who killed themselves:/ both were women, both started up their cars/ with the garage door shut, both times/ we didn’t get a single day off.” There is something so unnerving and flat in this opening, and yet it leaves you wanting to know more. Like that gruff, matter-of-fact guy in the bar, once you begin to listen to his anecdotes, you find you don’t want Petruzelli to stop.