Good afternoon, Infoxicators! In the wake of Political Punch, it felt important to me to run something entirely different in tone for this week – something subtler, something focused inwards. That impulse resulted in a compilation of art for this week that I find damn beguiling, if I do say so myself.
Molly Sutton Kiefer’s haunting, domestic poems deal with motherhood, daughterhood, partnerhood, and widowhood — all of which she uses to illuminate the desperate human tendency to guard against loss, despite its inevitability. In a poem that narrates a nightmare in which her young son has gone missing, Kiefer’s speaker tells us, “Someone suggests I get a flashlight to check all the window wells as if he were a kitten. I don’t want to see his body and the wells are so complicated with clumps of decaying leaves.” Even in the midst of a terrifying loss, the heart petrifies almost immediately, to the point of pragmatic and emotive immobility, at potential further loss. And yet there is the human machine that absorbs loss, and the changes loss brings, even as the psyche resists them; in her poem about a woman who survives her husband, Kiefer’s narrator leaves us with the chilled motions of necessity that seem almost to execute themselves when grief demands adaptation: “The widow must cancel all her joint accounts. Open new ones. // The widow erases her name. Writes it again.”
Lisa Cole’s review of Kristina Marie Darling’s book Requited, similarly, focuses on the internal mechanisms of human nature – our connection to one another, to the natural world, and the connections we fire within ourselves – and how poetry allows us to cartograph (I don’t know why this isn’t a ‘real’ verb, but guess what, it is now) and tell the truth about those impulses and connections. Cole takes it even a step further, suggesting that poetry helps us raise ourselves, evolve into things we wish we were but maybe haven’t yet become.
Finally, speaking of cartography, we have a small sample of flood photography by social scientist N. Henry. Intended to document a devastating flood in upstate New York, it records/immortalizes a historical moment; it also, perhaps unintentionally, reflects the relationship between the natural world and the people most affected by the loss that this natural disaster created in their environment.
The alchemy that happens in this headspace is fascinating to me, not because it’s terrifying (which it is), but because I think it suggests that loss and disaster and the sense of cataclysm they carry, which we reflexively attempt to resist and evade no matter what are ingrained in our DNA. They’re in the fabric of our being, our existence. Which suggests that they, and the adaptations they bring about — surviving a flood, a deceased spouse or friend, the end of an intimate relationship — are part of what we need to survive. We don’t overcome them, as we tell ourselves; we internalize them and carry them with us as we become something newer, but not new, in their wake.
‘Til next week! Wishing beatitudes and a seldom kinda quiet for each of y’all. And myself.
- Fox Frazier-Foley
