One week away and the forest has changed by Jennifer Elise Foerster

“One week away and the forest has changed” from The Maybe-Bird by Jennifer Elise Foerster from The Song Cave

Pastoral before Decomposition + The Grief Artist by Traci Brimhall

In half Light 2 by Prunella Clough.

Pastoral before Decomposition

I imagine it lovely, the place he was killed
imagine darkness as clear as it was before God

learned to speak, imagine the Milky Way burning
through the light-stained night, imagine trees blacker

than the sky, and then imagine cicadas grating April.
The cold was crisp, I imagine, and scooped out stale

carbon dioxide from his lungs. One of those good pains.
My imagination wants to redeem the bareness of fact,

so I imagine the field he dies in as a place we might
have picnicked, imagine wind entering his clothes

and leaving again—not the knife. No. I will only imagine
the way the cars versed themselves in curve and velocity

through the arterial streets. Not how the men took turns.
not the way his body proved to the medical examiner

that he struggled, lifted his hands to defend himself—
no, I imagine the grass, how it must have nodded along,

how his phone lit up with a blue light blinking, blinking
at the driver who stayed behind, his thumb brushing

the red END from the screen like wiping an eyelash
from his lover’s cheek. I imagine her, only hours away,

letting the spring salt into her sleepless room, Atlantic
waves curling in on themselves, red tide creeping toward

shore, and the suffocated fish with bellies like moonlight
doing what is surely required of all the dead and rising.

—from Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod by Traci Brimhall.

Like many people, I’ve spent much of 2020 and 2021 thinking about and processing grief. Individual and collective, minute and global, cellular and generational, past and present. This week, I read Traci Brimhall’s poetry collection Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod from Copper Canyon Press and found myself challenged on my own beliefs about processing grief. If this book is a woven piece of art, the warp yarns are made of taut grief and loss and the weft shot through—over and under, over and under—is made of joy, wonder, curiosity, and most surprisingly to me—imagination. Through every poem, Traci makes clear how intrinsically linked grief and imagination are. Often grief and loss are the result of violence, whether it is violence enacted by another (such as what the main character of this poem faces) or enacted by our own bodies (miscarriage, cancer, chronic pain, etc.) the two are often companions.

To process violence we have to access imagination. We have to imagine how such a thing can happen, we have to imagine why it continues to happen, we have to imagine ourselves as part of that violence and ask “Could I? Do I?” In opening our imaginations to the violence, we also open our imaginations to its opposite—what can I do to create instead of destroy? Living through grief. Surviving violence. Rejecting violence as a choice. All of these require imagination.

Reading Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod wasn’t enough, so I sought out more from Traci. In the essay “The Grief Artist” at Guernica, Traci writes: “The body has instincts for grieving, though I’ve always had trouble understanding them.” Traci’s poems in Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod explore how the body grieves, works through the process, imagines more and different ways of being. In short, the poems in Traci’s book provide a guide for how we can move through grief and violence, not with grace or patience as is often called for in grief literature, but with imagination. As a way to soften, reshape, remember, relive, pave a new way forward. Traci understands grief does not have to be graceful or fluid—“In art and grief there are days you’re not proud of, days the emotions turn ugly, days the images don’t turn out the way you want. But that’s the human in us, and it belongs in the process.” These poems contain the human, the ugly, the hard, the process. And they are better for it. And I am better for reading them.

For more on Traci Brimhall’s thoughts on grief and imagination, read this interview.

The Short Story — Deep Work, Patience, + Meditation

Sudden Snow, Helen Frankenthaler

In reading Edith Wharton’s The Writing of Fiction, it became clear that she calls, again and again, for the short story writer to think deeply on their story, to be patient with it, to meditate on the subject, form, style, and characters before launching into its telling. The short story requires the writer to know the story inside and out, to know exactly how and why it must be told. The way she writes about it, Wharton seems to see the short story as an act of meditation and deep work, not just on the story being told, but on the person telling it. As she writes early in the book: “One good heart-break will furnish the poet with many songs, and the novelist with a considerable number of novels. But they must have hearts that can break.” And how can we have hearts without deep thought, reflection, and the patience to live the life set before us?

"True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. … Vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer’s own; and the mind which would bring this secret germ to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.”

“…the only remedy is to resolutely abandon the larger for the smaller field, to narrow one’s vision to one’s pencil, and do the small thing closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially.”

“The short-story writer must not only know from what angle to present his anecdote if it is to give out all its fires, but must understand just why that particular angle and no other is the right one. He must therefore have turned his subject over and over, walked around it, so to speak…”

“The precious instinct of selection is distilled by that long patience which, if it be not genius, must be one of the genius’s chief reliances in communicating itself.”

“Nothing but deep familiarity with his subject will protect the short-story writer from another danger: that of contenting himself with a mere sketch of the episode selected.”

“True economy consists in the drawing out of one’s subject of every drop of significance it can give, true expenditure in devoting time, meditation and patient labour to the process of extraction and representation.”

Quotes from The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton. I highly recommend pairing this book with the George Saunders episode of the podcast In Writing with Hattie Crisell.

In the Field Between Us by Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison

I’ve never read a collection of poems that so saliently addresses a life lived with a disability, in the shadows of medical intervention both the ones that linger behind you and the ones that are cast ahead of you, and how the scared body in pain exists in this beautiful and terrifying world. I cried over my coffee more than once as I read these intimate letters between Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison because I found echoed there my experiences, for the first time in literature not found in an obscure medical study found in the Google rabbit hole after a night of pain keeps me awake and wondering why and how I got there and if I am alone with it. I’m not. I have these overheard conversations, like clues toward an answer.

Again and again, came to mind the image of sea glass. Broken, ragged, sharp, raw, but through the tumble of waves something beautiful, smoothed, a story in its own right. These poems were the waves, I am the broken bit of glass from a bottle.

Revising the Storm by Geffrey Davis

At any point while I am reading (always in my home these days) there is most certainly a basket of clean laundry within reach waiting to be folded and put away, a cup of coffee going cold, an old water cup nobody will claim and take care of, and classical music rasping from the old radio, a sound that has been the backdrop of my life for as long as I can remember and is now the backdrop to my children’s lives.

Revising the Storm by Geffrey Davis is a study in what bruises we bring to love. A study in how we stumble forward trying to gain our footing, sometimes falling all the same, but always, it seems, with a nearby hand outstretched, helping us to our feet. This book is a study in grace and tenderness, grown in the shadow of pain and grief—for where else can grace and tenderness grow?

It is an honor to be invited into the intimacy of these poems.