“Bedtime Stories: Poems” by Steve Langan; Littoral Books, Portland, Maine, 2024; 104 pages, paperback, $20.

I have a feeling that many of the poems in Steve Langan’s new collection, “Bedtime Stories,” are about the mixed feelings of people who deal with people with drug addictions. I’m not sure about this, though.

According to biographical notes, Langan is an expert in public health administration. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the long-vaunted Iowa writers program. He has a house on Cliff Island, in Casco Bay, and is a founder of the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Seven Doctors Project, in which health care workers use creative writing to come to grips with the stresses of their profession.

Now, most of the poems in “Bedtime Stories” have a dreamlike quality whose literal sense is not easy to discern. This difficulty is generated from sentences—usually plainly stated—whose meanings nonetheless do not follow on each other, the way images and thoughts come and go in a dream. Inside the dream (when you’re in bed, that is), disconnected images and ideas can make complete sense. But as soon as you wake up and start describing them to yourself, they seem like confusing nonsense.

The poems in “Bedtime Stories” seem to reflect, if not actual dreams, maybe the often-tenuous inner lives of some health care workers. This is pretty specialized knowledge to have to bring to your reading, but it’s a way of making sense of otherwise dreamy material.

One of the shorter poems, “Modern Man Is Monstrous, Let’s Not Forget,” goes, in full:

Seems like any time I have a minute

to relax here goes somebody all dressed up

on TV talking about the end of time.

I saw a photo of Michel Foucault today.

So serious! Who didn’t love learning

all about Mussolini? The randomness of

catastrophic events in our lives calls for action.

But what are we supposed to do?

It’s hard enough, some days, to make a sandwich.

The bread, all of the components,

the time it takes to put away the condiments.

What the post-structuralist French philosopher Foucault is doing here I don’t specifically know; he probably talked about Mussolini at some point, in the context of different forms of socio-political-linguistic oppression. But if you posit that Foucault, Mussolini and the rest appear here as if in a dream, then this poem could be depicting the inner, day-to-day conflictions of a harried, spiritually battered, yet idealistically devoted health care worker. A sense of coherence can develop around the idea that it’s hard to be responsible for large sociopolitical stresses within the same state of mindfulness as your everyday stresses-such as, maybe, surgery, which to a surgeon might be like making lunch, an association that might arise in a dream. I’m not sure.

The overall mood of these dreams is ironic, sometimes bitterly so. The irony is expressed mostly cheerfully, while driving home a sense of futility, up to and including bleak emptiness. “You’ve got to have courage,” opens “Courage Poem.” Line 2 continues: “It really does you no good.” Then the next image makes gallows humor out of a suicide attempt: “The rope hanging from the base // of the chandelier for instance, / was iffy, and upon examination / the knot wasn’t exact enough. // Damn utilitarianism.” The poem goes through a dreamlike series of ironic juxtapositions, and ends: “so one continues into the sublime muck // and morass, the innumerable shouts / of pleasure and woe, which we’ve done, / together, smilingly, up until now.” It feels like whatever the unnamed endeavor is—and it could be the making of poetry, I’m not sure—it’s futile and empty.

The irony of emptiness and uncertainty pervades these skillfully made poems. You may find it disruptive to your sleep.

Steve Langan’s other books include “Freezing,” “Notes on Exile and Other Poems,” “Meet Me at the Happy Bar” and “What It Looks Like, How It Flies.” “Bedtime Stories” is the ninth volume in Littoral Books’ Contemporary Maine Poetry Series, available online and from local book shops.

Off Radar takes note of poetry and books with Maine connections the first Friday of each month. Contact Dana Wilde at dwilde.offradar@gmail.com.