Illuminating Wonders: A Review of Amy Leach’s Things That Are by Elizabeth Paul

cover credit: Milkweed Editions

Things That Are by Amy Leach

Milkweed Editions (2012)

Reviewed by Elizabeth Paul

Amy Leach’s essay collection, Things That Are, invites readers to a change of heart and perspective by exploring topics from the natural world that tend to fall outside the human radar. In the first section, “Things of the Earth,” she employs her curiosity like a macro lens and a pair of binoculars, bringing the mysterious marvels of animals, plants, and insects into view. In one essay, she examines how tendrils on a pea plant reach blindly for a lattice. In others, she observes how a beaver hauls sticks to quiet the river, how fainting goats collapse at the sound of predators, and how a warbler beats its way across the ocean in a non-stop, ninety-hour flight. In the second section, “Things of Heaven,” Leach turns a telescopic lens on the vast and remote, exploring topics such as the identities of stars and the rules of orbit. Things That Are reminds readers that they live in a natural world of wonders fully accessible to those with the eyes and heart to see it.

In addition to opening readers’ eyes to natural wonders, Leach gives them the feeling of experiencing such wonders first-hand through informed and detailed description. For example, in the following passage about the defense mechanisms of caterpillars, she writes:

The azalea caterpillar, a black-and-white plaid caterpillar with a cherry-red head and legs, when disturbed, arches up its head and thrusts it back, like a hairpin, and arches its tail up like an S. To be honest, it looks more electrocuted than scary when it does this. The yellow-necked caterpillar twists itself into the same shape, except that the yellow-neck vibrates as well, which really brings electric trauma to mind.

For all the scientific knowledge inherent in such descriptions, Things That Are has the feel of a children’s book or fairy tale. Leach’s humor, playful spirit, and love of language create a feeling of wonder. For example, in “Trooping with Trouble,” she begins a meditation on mortality and vulnerability with this playful paragraph: 

“To whom, then, does the Earth belong?” said the dragon as he was being slain. “Sometimes it seems to belong to dragons; at other times to dragon-gaggers. Sometimes it seems to belong to the harmattan wind, then to the doldrums. Sometimes to the slaves, when the sea parts to let them through, and sometimes to the sea when the sea does not part. Now to the siskin finch and sablefish; now to smitheries and smelteries. Perhaps the Earth is neutral, like a bridge between two cities, traveled on but possessed by no traveler.” Such are the behindhand ponderings of a doomed dragon.

Through alliteration, personification, and wordplay, the text speaks like a story-book, coaxing readers into a state of innocence and suspended disbelief, helping them to see magic even in mortality. A highlight of Leach’s humor is the book’s glossary that helps with earthy language such as “mouldywarp,” “crocodilopolis,” and “argle-bargle.” Of the latter, the glossary, in lieu of a definition, asks impertinently, “What, are professional bruisers like myrmidons going to argue with flowering vines, exchanging views, citing evidence, justifying positions? I don’t think so.” 

The book’s prelude, interlude, and postlude set these essays, and readers, in a period in history when humans have distanced themselves from nature. And these framing pieces provide subtle insights into why and how they have done it: a propensity to conquer, a fear of the unknown, and an absorption with their own technological creations. The book speaks a warning, but not in the words of gloom and doom characteristic of much environmental literature. Rather, the warning takes the form of an invitation to be more awake to the wonders of the natural world. In fact, Leach takes her readers by the hand to rediscover nature right now, between the covers of her book. In doing so, she reinitiates readers into their natural world of wonders. Things That Are baptizes readers in the book’s spirit by way of its epigraph by John Donne, from which the title is taken: “All things that are, are equally removed from being nothing.”

I Am the Eggplant: A Review of Lindsay Lusby's Imago by Michael VanCalbergh

cover credit: dancing girl press

Imago by Lindsay Lusby
dancing girl press (2014)

Reviewed by Michael VanCalbergh

Lindsay Lusby’s debut chapbook Imago, from dancing girl press, is steeped in fairy tale and myth. In fact, her work has absorbed so much magic that readers could swear to have heard a version of this story before, but quickly find that this book fills what has been missing from contemporary mythology.

Lusby’s chapbook is comprised of only the title poem broken into sections. These sections—which include parts numbered 1 ½, 2 ½, and 4 ¾—immediately challenge established ideas of what a sectioned poem can be. Her sections allow readers to see separate parts of a larger poem, but also create an increased intimacy between the poems with the same base number. It is striking how brilliantly the first two poems (1 and 1 ½) stand completely apart, yet seem to naturally form from each other like conjoined twins.

Lusby’s book contains the classic myth of transformation with the unique twist of imago’s double meaning: the transformation to the adult stage in an insect’s life and a psychoanalysis in which the idealization of a loved one carries into adulthood. In the beginning of the book, readers experience the psychoanalysis concept of imago as the girl strokes an eggplant to sleep. Lusby writes:

It becomes the absence, she thinks.
Pulls the remnant of light from
every bedroom shadow
and buries it inside, condenses it.

The admiration expressed here sets up a reverence that the girl feels for the eggplant in lieu of an actual family member. Immediately afterward, she considers the “blasphemous” idea of eating the eggplant’s seeds and asks, “Would I be changed? Would I transform?” Lusby’s twist of the multiple meanings of imago implants the idealization of the eggplant and the transformation the girl yearns for into a brand new definition. The similarity to common myths not only makes this indistinguishable from the stories readers are familiar with, but grows a new garden in our imaginations perfect for cultivating eggplant.

The reason for the unlikely relationship between a vegetable and a girl becomes clearer as readers see the mother who “did not leave a note / or a casserole” replaced by the “smooth purple skin, blacker than black” of the eggplant in almost every way. The parent-child relationship starts with Lusby expertly inserting the eggplant as a base of knowledge:

The eggplant teaches the girl about the afterlife.

It says, When we die, we all go to
the great compost bucket, where we
experience the transcendence of
our own beautiful decomposition.

After the eggplant’s patience in sharing answers (it is hard not to imagine the girl asking these questions with the fury of a growing child), the girl quickly strives to imitate this stand-in parent when she decides to “dye her hair / a deep, deep purple” and even becomes a carnivore to avoid the eyes of her salad “accusing her of countless atrocities” committed to vegetable-kind.

Their relationship culminates in the only thing left that the eggplant can possibly teach the girl: metamorphosis. The connection between a parent ushering the child to adulthood and the literal preparations the girl makes are unmistakable:

The girl eats and eats to prepare herself. She
thinks of this as packing a suitcase.

…

The girl zips herself inside an aubergine
sleeping bag on the living room floor.
Counts back from one hundred and
closes her eyes.

The eggplant tells her a bedtime story.

It says, This is the beginning.

Imago’s transformation definition returns full-force as the girl literally acts out the part of an insect entering the pupa stage. For the girl, it is not merely a step into adulthood, but a Big Bang that creates a completely new understanding of the world and her place in it. As she transforms, the eggplant “begins to wilt and shrink” literally sacrificing itself and becoming “emptied, a deflated / black balloon on the living room floor.” This unconditional sacrifice leads to nothing short of the revolution readers have been promised from the very first page, as the girl emerges “asteroid and bright.”

Even with this understanding of transformation, it seems impossible to express the immensity of Lusby’s book. Reinventing the tale of a girl’s transformation into womanhood, commentary on traditional mythology, conflicts with sexual expression and a person’s relationship to an idealized self are only a handful of possibilities these poems explore. Lusby’s ability to create such intricate poems with apparent ease makes her poems become new with each reading and leaves readers wishing to return. Imagoachieves the adult stage that all poems strive for: It transforms readers into a “series of continuous atomic explosions / bright as hydrogen.”

A Mother’s Sigh: Review of Cat Dixon's Too Heavy to Carry by Sally Deskins

cover credit:
Stephen F. Austin State University Press

Too Heavy to Carry by Cat Dixon

Stephen F. Austin University Press (2014)

Reviewed by Sally Deskins

Cat Dixon’s Too Heavy To Carry takes you to that dark place—the moment of realizing life isn’t a fairy tale. When the rug is swept up underneath, life continues and you have to keep standing—and in Dixon’s case, the children must as well.

When her world comes crashing down after a husband’s affair, in Too Heavy To Carry, Dixon doesn’t prettify or hide—she delves in, as though relishing the despair. We wonder throughout: Will the anguish eventually envelope her in madness? Her writing seems to waver that line, but, it seems, her children keep her on the side of the here and now.

In a few poems, Dixon considers nature and animals—moths, snake, fish, water, a gully, a farm—but her writing shines and is perhaps most raw when seizing the trial and embracing of motherhood. As a point in case, “Commiserating with Another Parent” stuns with brutal honesty. She writes:

…No one has ever
agreed with me before and as you
pour, we talk of childless times—
before—all grand.
We pretend it’s that time again.
The mosquitoes buzz into
the sweet bottles. We watch
as they fly inside the glass—
then you cork them, trapped.

As a rare parental admission, Dixon unapologetically exhibits a yearning for the liberated life before children. Still, her affection isn’t compromised by angst, which consequently presents the oft-dreaded love poems to children as authentic and even delightfully engaging. As in the down-to-earth “Daughters Over Sons,” the unflowery self-reflective note to her child recalls the love that was. She explains:

…I want you to know me, know your father, know that once I snuggled him at night and prayed for him to be safe when he raced off to fire calls. I danced with him in the room that is now yours to Bruce all night and kissed him, and I will never love like that again nor should I. Life came after that…. The sky cries for a month knowing you will love me—you will never know me.

Through the remarkable irony of parenthood and childhood, from idolizing to hating to accepting, she seems to state that her child will never know the “old” real, naïve, liberated self before the stun of childbearing. But unabashed ferocity reigns again in “A Wild Boar Stampedes My House at Night.” It is a dream read as though scribbled the morning after and suggests that it was based on reality. In the burly tale, her husband’s “whore” sends a boar to attack the narrator. As Dixon races to protect her child, her friend appears to help. But the child is still attacked. She describes:

From behind, Shawna shoots the boar with a .22, and it falls dead…. ‘If you had that, why didn’t you use it before, you idiot!’ I roar. I recall the evenings after we put our son to bed how I’d rant at my husband over our sexless existence, over how he could use Viagra with his mistress, but not with me. I pick the child up, hold him in my arms, and apologize for the boar. I leave Shawna to clean up the mess.

The dramatic saga recalls the mother’s relatable and profound yearning, but inability, to keep children safe from intermixing with the muddled marriage. Optimism is displayed via the assurance of a close friend, but also a subtly dreaded dependence upon this friend to pick up after her.

The collection’s existential objective is put plainly in “Gully,” in the perspective of a tree that for decades, “was peacefully standing, a hostess seating / birds, squirrels, leaves… till the land, like a throat / was opened and roots, bloody / tendons, shot forth. / Then it was all downhill / from there. I began to rot / and the other trees / slowly slipped onto a conveyor / belt…” With this, readers see the light turning to dark, the goodness rotting, and the once organic, happy nurturing life now becoming dully mechanical.

Although the last poems “Glacier” and “Does God Play Dice” attempt to answer existential questions to qualm the despair, readers are left not with comfort, but with appropriate confrontation. Dixon writes:

…These polished slopes, ridges
or caps, none are accidental.

The trouble with sorrow, affliction, and imperfection, she suggests, is its immanence. Reading the aching melancholy of falling apart in Too Heavy To Carry, alongside the dichotomy of affection for and burden of parenthood, we may wonder about the said children: When will their cross over come from naïveté to staid awareness? Alas, that isn’t the point. In an overhyped child-raising society, parents’ thoughts and selves can be viewed as secondary—discontent with motherhood prohibited! Dixon daringly and admirably reveals and carries her heft onto these pages. Highlighting the ugly, her resolute writing makes the sweetness and beauty of motherhood legitimate, albeit not without travail.

Luminous Book: A Review of Maura High’s The Garden of Persuasions by Angele Ellis

cover credit: Jacar Press

The Garden of Persuasions by Maura High
Jacar Press 2013

Reviewed by Angele Ellis

Maura High’s life and work have brought her from Wales to Nigeria and North Carolina, but her poems focus on ordinary, if intense, moments that reflect her interest in Asian poetry and Zen Buddhism. For example, High merges the commonplace incident of a bird’s fatal flight into a picture window with the infinity of disappearance, as of human airplane passengers, in “Exemplary Statements, with Meanings and Annotations.” This small death provides a glimpse into a great mystery:

…A bead
of blood leaking from its beak

To be flying in that blue
and then suddenly to be going

(we say, as if there were
some place to go to) and then gone

Each poem’s title in The Garden of Persuasions (winner of the Jacar Press 2013 Chapbook Contest) is taken from a bibliography of ancient Chinese works and commentaries. In fact, the book’s title poem bears the name of a story collection compiled during the Han Dynasty (1st century BCE). Along with the brushstrokes of the cherry tree branches in Jinxiu Alice Zhao’s cover illustration and the four ideographs that translate the title page, this decision underscores High’s subtle yet rich artistic technique.

High’s repeated use of brief lines—three to seven syllables—and her strong relationship to nature make her images as vivid as haiku. Her juxtaposition of short lines with longer lines in couplets, tercets, and one-line stanzas, as well as her frequent omission of punctuation brings an almost breathless tension to such poems as “Grand Mystery, with Collected Commentaries,” in which the reader feels as much as sees a snake’s entrance into water. As High describes the scene, it is almost as if the reader has become the alien creature:

A long brown snake
scribbled downslope

and slipped into the water without a splash

The pond sealed over as if
nothing had happened

but something did happen…

Even when High’s imagination travels to Ghana, inspired by an artist who makes works from ocean debris, her female beachcomber remains aloof and solitary, caught in the act of gathering essential to any form of creation. In “New Account of Tales of the World,” the artist’s movements become a dance set to an inaudible tune:

…but hers
is a private music—you see it

in her gait and how she bends
and turns and when she stops
to pluck at the strings of a net…

In more than one poem, High seamlessly shifts her attention to the inner world of a child, observed with precise detail—as for example, during the classes that High teaches when she isn’t writing. In “Writings for Elementary Instruction, two young students have very different responses to the national suicide prevention program To Write Love on Her Hands, which gives High a beautiful opportunity to play with her classic sensibility in contemporary time. The speaker attends to her task as the children do to theirs:

The boy wrote in cursive
inside the penciled outline

of his hand Pittsburgh Steelers
and looks over to his sister

who is copying the word LOVE
backward inside her smaller hand

…

her word, in a space she chooses
among the other hands on the poster

as a gardener slips in a flower
and tamps the earth around it

This fragile flower of love is transformed into a riot of weeds in the chapbook’s title poem. High finds both lushness and stubborn humanity in “…sorrell and chickweed / moss, bluets, onion grass… their arguments as manifold as ours / as stemmed and rooted.” With delicate irony (“…They seem harmless, a gift / from some time before Eden”) she unfolds their glorious—or insidious—tenacity:

…it can take years
for one to make its point

to seed or spread by root
or spore or runner, to crowd

or shade out competitors
a garden cultivating itself

The parallels that High draws between the flawed natural world and the flawed human world become strikingly interchangeable in High’s “Luminous Book,” in which the essence of dying autumn leaves seems to enter the speaker’s library and mingles with the pages of her volumes. As she describes the moment:

The leaves stop breathing and turn
the colors of clay, casting

a russet light across the room

on all my books, their lacunae,
errors, subplots ramifying in all directions …

Here—as elsewhere in The Garden of Persuasions—High’s poetic concentration creates a charged and mystical space. To read Maura High’s work with the careful attention it deserves is to enter a world in which every object is sacred, and to feel, with the speaker, a holy awe at the power inherent in the simple act of handling a book. High ends “Luminous Book” on a note of meditative exhilaration:

…I could take down any one at random
and open it, and bow to the light

emitted by its pages

Bittersweet Blossoms: A Review of Sara Henning's A Sweeter Water by Sally Deskins

cover credit: Lavender Ink

A Sweeter Water by Sara Henning

Lavender Ink (2013)

Reviewed by Sally Deskins

Sara Henning’s second poetry collection, A Sweeter Water, is a tough read. As the title suggests, there is a sweeter place out there, and this unsweetened story is about a woman struggling to find it. Much of the poetry collection involves nature with a keen sense of Earth and country. But it takes a few pages to get under the skin of this book and begin to understand what is going on, which is the relationship of the narrator and her father. Henning presents a child’s point of view in the first section and then quickly comes of age after a tragic incident. Readers experience the narrator’s world through her eyes as she literally looks up to her father.

The first piece presents perhaps the happiest moment of the book, “Birthday,” with brief imagery presenting philosophical queries, and intimate foreshadowing for the somber story ahead. Henning writes:

To be a self is to be an incompletion, a yearning for parts…

The day your father looks in your eyes and says daughter is your first birthday.

His eyes the minute they go out, the candles blown.

The poems that commence the collection are abstract, dark, and sometimes disturbing. For example, “How We Love” tells of a python eating a leopard cub, but somehow Henning brings it all back to love:

…Even the leopard carried the cub’s body to a field close to her den, chewed it tenderly to pieces, swallowed each down. Even I still look for your effigy everywhere, practice your body until it is raw susurration, burned not by my throat but my heart. Which of us stays at her guttural refrain for days, though our love was never so close to our hunger? What is love but a set of urges?

Themes about animals and the body further interweave as the narrator delves graphically deeper into existential dilemmas, such as in “Three Themes on Rescue.” As she tries to save a hen found lying on the side of the road, readers see her love of animals and tender spirit, her deep yearning for saving something from death, and the sadness of her past:

I held her still
when she brooded,
cloaca tight with the next
egg’s clench and spasm,
imagining my mother
on the bathroom floor,
blood from the miscarriage
like urine staining
the animal’s tail,
Father three weeks dead.

Direct emotion is displayed in “How She Loves Me,” a standout piece where the raw despair of experiencing a paternal suicide is realized through her relationship with her mother. Henning explains:

…so I’d learn to want her apology pressed onto
my heart like a spray of oleander, on it the words
sunder, daughter, bitter indictment, something to hold
at the end of my sorrow: sorry he left us without flowers.
Sorry he’s never coming back.

Readers further witness the narrator’s troubled adolescence as she seems to grow up in an instant. Her body continues to play a strong role as she grasps at the living. This is powerfully stated in “Lost Things.” Henning writes:

…all these failed translations that feed my mind and not my heart. The tom was cold when I touched my face to his fur; my brother is marrying a woman I have never spoken to, and yet this urge is here to name things which I am not: hen’s wing ripped off by a dog, mother burning my childhood on a pyre, childhood expunged from my body like a struggling sack of sugar.

She comes of age in “Adolescence,” a stellar rendition of the wretchedness of age thirteen, especially in her state, with poignant visualizations. She states:

I tried to read their futures
from the tealeaves of their broken hearts,
beer stolen from neighbor’s basement coolers,
cigarettes dangling between slim, shaking fingers,
where could they situate
the blank slate before a boy (which boy)
could bruise them, is it redemption
in the liberty of being left out past curfew,
longing for a future
that won’t martyr them silently

Moving and despairing realizations during intimate moments reveal her anguish of “the hinge between girlhood and womanhood exchanging masks. And through sleepovers and her first kiss, readers experience how much the narrator’s body is interwoven in girlhood and becoming a woman, and how heartbreak can impact relationships. But there is hope toward the end of the collection with “Glass Negative” and the last piece, “To Speak of Dahlias.” The narrator allows deep and sad reflection on her childhood, adolescence, her body, past relationships, and the present. She writes:

…
instead of howl—buried them
until frost became
dahlia blossom,
luminous material
growing from earth
that once burned.
 *
“And I’m left with dahlias,
deluges, ladder to nowhere
but the sky.”

These metaphors of “howling” as perhaps crying, and the beautiful flowers growing from the earth that “once burned” suggests that through it all, reaching bottom, there is nowhere to go but up. So ends Henning’s truly raw and telling account of one woman’s life through parental struggles and her own as she deals with the regular struggles of adolescence, relationships and life’s meanings. Through intimate relationships with nature, animals, and the body, readers witness and recognize an important exploration and elaboration of extremely intense sides of life.  A Sweeter Water is a welcome, albeit complex, introduction to Henning’s work.