Holding dear

I find it pretty easy to blog about writing, reading, and teaching–but very hard to post about other subjects that are constantly on my mind, from climate justice and social justice to politics. I don’t have special expertise in the latter subjects; I really don’t like jump-on-the-bandwagon social media declarations for reasons I could write a book about; but I’m also not sure when it’s right or useful to dwell in grief and anger. People treat each other and the more-than-human world with terrible violence. Anger is appropriate and good when it motivates action, but, sustained, harms body and mind. Or am I contributing to the world’s terribleness by not constantly yelling about the need for radical change? I seriously don’t know.

I DO know that it’s a small good thing to support art, openly activist and otherwise, because it helps us metabolize these strong emotions, stay grounded, and focus on what’s important. In that spirit, three cheers for Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States, edited by Luisa A. Igloria, Aileen Cassinetto, and Jeremy S. Hoffman. This beautiful anthology’s official publication date is in a few weeks, to coincide with the release of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, but it arrived here early because I have a poem in it. So do Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Dave Bonta, Ada Limón, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, January Gill O’Neil, Craig Santos Perez, Martha Silano, Cindy Veach, Claire Wahmanholm, and others whose writing I’ve spent many hours with–note how many are current or erstwhile poetry bloggers!–plus a ton of poets whose powerful work I’d never come across before. Eco-poetry often conveys sorrow as well as urgency, and that’s certainly here, but what strikes me most is how this collection centers love and tender attention. As a consequence, the book also delivers a high dose of lyric beauty, if that doesn’t sound too old-fashioned.

Dear Human arrived during #sealeychallenge month here in the US: every August, the poet Nicole Sealey dares people to read a book of poetry every day and post about it on social media. Some years, I’ve really tried, but this year I’ve simply endeavored to read more poetry (a book every 3 days-ish), and use the hashtag to celebrate books that don’t get enough attention. I appreciate the impetus to buy small-press books and dig into the to-be-read pile. I just don’t want to rush an art that’s about slowing down and paying attention.

For a few of them, I managed to write a paragraph about how the work struck me, so I’ll include them below–sort of micro-reviews with a bloggy, personal bent.

Ann E. Michael, The Red Queen Hypothesis, Highland Park, 2023

Like her wonderful blog, Michael’s second full-length collection is meditative, witty, and smart, with a scientific and sometimes philosophical bent. Also like her blog, it’s closely observant of the more-than-human world in flux. “The Red Queen hypothesis,” I learned, comes from biology: species must keep evolving to survive. Poems and the people behind them must keep changing, too. In addition, The Red Queen Hypothesis suggests the advantage of sexual reproduction, and there are plenty of seductively “soft persuasions” in this collection. Like the “Stew Cook” speaking to her beloved, this is a book to “fill nooks with aromatic hours.” Shout-out to all the tasty slant-rhymes amid a profusion of traditional forms: rhetoric/ lick, beige/ strange, viola/ Iowa. My sense of knowing Ann pretty well by now might be an illusion—I’ve spent way more time reading her work than with her in person—but then again, intimacy with another person’s way of thinking is one of reading’s chief attractions.

Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Corvus and Crater, Salmon Poetry, 2023

I started this book in an empty waiting room as a muzak version of U2’s “With or Without You” hummed through hidden speakers. I finished it over lunch on my muggy back porch then tried to get my black cat to pose with it for an Instagram post (he was profoundly uncooperative). None of these setting details seem appropriate for a crow-haunted series of spell-poems and rituals from Alaskan winter, but it all harmonized, somehow. The book’s spareness—it consists of 54 poems of 54 syllables each, in honor of an upcoming birthday—connects to a winter of the brain I’ve been feeling as a 55-year-old woman wondering what comes next. An evocative and very lovely book.  

Liz Berry, The Home Child, Chatto & Windus, 2022

A compelling novel in verse about a relative of the author, an orphaned girl of twelve sent as a “home child” from Birmingham to Novia Scotia in 1908. It’s necessarily in fragments, a mix of fact and speculation, rather than a continuous long poem. I didn’t know a thing about the home child program between the U.K. and Canada, but it reminded me of a story my mother used to tell about her family: once upon a time, a brother and sister were sent from Liverpool to Philadelphia because their parents couldn’t afford to keep them. The elder child (my great grandfather, I think) was apprenticed to a butcher but miserably treated; the adoptive parents wanted just the girl, but the brother had been sent along to take care of her. He eventually ran away to work on a sailing ship. On many voyages between the U.S. to Liverpool, he learned woodworking and settled back in Liverpool as a ship’s carpenter. I’d like to research this more one day–perhaps for a poetry collection? Berry gives me an interesting model to consider. 

Other books I admired but didn’t have time to take notes on:

• Franny Choi, The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On
• Lauren Slaughter, Spectacle
• Oliver de la Paz, The Diaspora Sonnets
• Molly Peacock, The Analyst
• H.D., Vale Ave
• Adrienne Raphel, Our Dark Academia
• Evie Shockley, Suddenly We

I’ve just started Frannie Lindsay’s The Snow Wife, too, and I was hoping to get to a couple of others, but the annual academic apocalypse looms: department retreat tomorrow, Tuesday I help lead a panel discussion on the First-Year Read (Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street), and of course I have classes to prep. At least my gratitude about it all currently runs high: last year I was a department head, and this year I’m just a teacher and reader and editor and writer, amen.