The State She’s In
by Lesley Wheeler
Tinder Box Editions, $18, paperback, 106 pages
In these unusual times, I am taking an unusual step: I am reviewing a friend’s new book of poetry: The State She’s In, by Lesley Wheeler (Tinderbox Editons, 2020).
Like so many books published in March and April of 2020, it is languishing in quarantine alongside its author, its release derailed.
Moreover, as most publishers are not shipping books due to COVID-19, review copies of new books of poetry as rare as they are yearned for.
Hence my delight in receiving a copy of The State She’s In from Wheeler herself, and my sense of responsibility to review it.
For here is a volcanic eruption of 70 new poems by a mature artist in full possession of her craft, and the subject matter is as timely as it is compelling.
That is, the artfulness of the poetry is relentless, inventive, and unsentimental as it structures Wheeler’s ambitious intellectual project of exploding myths of belonging in the U.S. South.
Accordingly, these poems investigate a complex range of interwoven questions, examining race, gender, education, poverty, pollution, ageing, and more.
To cohere these intersectional concerns, Wheeler convokes a motif of the potentiality of transformative change.
For example, in an inspiring epistolary poem of feminist solidarity to Anne Spencer, she writes of how “[o]ne hopes for a breeze, impolite, / rowdy, to rip the gorgeous petals / down. One hopes to be it.”
Similarly, in the poem “Racketing Spirits,” Wheeler celebrates the intractable spirit of an enslaved, eight-year-old girl, Maria, in Virginia in 1825, writing that she could “persuade the stones to rise and heat and hurtle / in revolt.”
Such is the hunger for rebellious transformation that pervades this book.
Moreover, Wheeler knows, too, that such transformation involves pain. As she explains succinctly in still another poem, “No bloom without bees, although I fear the sting.” And sting these poems do.
They sting with the pain of historical memory and with the pain of Wheeler’s own lived experience. As aforementioned, the former includes localized instances of racism, sexism, pollution, loss, sickness, and cruelty, and so, too, does the latter with poignant lucidity.
The effect is to layer historiographies of violence with additional, micropolitical anecdotes, thereby intensifying the affect of disbelief, despair, and desperate hope emanating from the collection.
Thusly Wheeler in this, her fifth full-length book of poetry, struggles to work through and against personal and collective trauma. In her words, she is fighting to “[l]ive where I live, this earth, this body,” and who among us is not, particularly during a deadly global pandemic?
To subsist amidst so much crisis, Wheeler looks to nature for inspiration, especially when feeling intense flourishes of terror, grief, and/or rage.
For example, in the poem “State Roads,” she notes with resounding awe how “late snow gagged / the daffodil mouths— / but they kept yelling.”
In a kindred poem, she asks a walnut tree, “[h]ow do you persist, / knowing your shadow is poisonous?” And what she discovers through the poem is that “I need to learn / how to endure my own / bitterness.”
One way to do so, the book implies, is to transform poisonous bitterness into impassioned cries for compassion, justice, and equality.
In this manner, the poems comprising The State She’s In formulate an exhortation for each of us to “[b]e an ordinary comet-hunter,” meaning we must “[c]onsider how to gather available light, to see further.”
For in seeing further, we might begin to glimpse new horizons of being. We might discern a transformed set of conditions for living together on this troubled planet with more peace, wellness, and dignity.
Such is the promise of the feared sting, its gift of blooms.
And this is why Wheeler, from the agonizing state she’s in, begs in plangent apostrophe, “Talk dirty to us, change. Wheel like a season. Winter’s always vulnerable / to sunlight’s disclosure.”
Through that relentless belief in the possibility of transformation, Wheeler conjures hope despite her mouth being gagged by snow and loss and rage and grief. And it is inspiring to read how she trudges on, finding a way through the dark woods of poisonous bitterness.
That is why I dared to review the book, believing it capable of inspiring a widespread, diverse readership. In other words, what poetry-lover would not be helped by reading this poetry of tenacity, hope, and courage in this terrible historical moment?
Consequently, how could I abide literary norms that would preclude me from playing a small part in helping to disseminate it?
