“Wherever you find recovery, you’ll find relapsing as well,” Mary Ardery plainly states in the ghazal “Asheville,” from her finely-wrought debut Level Watch (June Road Press, September 2025). The collection’s speaker, a guide for a substance abuse treatment program, recounts her memories of hiking with, caring for, and learning from the women in the program in the unforgiving beauty of western North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Through these emotionally taxing experiences, chronicled in an even tone, Ardery reveals the challenges and nuances of what it means to be vigilant, to mourn, to hope, and ultimately, to evolve. Richly subtle and striking in its imagery, this collection is a forthright and moving portrait of recovery, relapse, and reinvention.
Organized into three sections preceded by a proem, Level Watch’s forty-eight poems narrate the speaker’s memories of camping, hiking, and driving through the wilderness with women in recovery from substance abuse. The collection’s proem, “Is This What People Mean?,” sets up its premise in controlled couplets:
That if you pull to the side of a quiet road
and close your eyes,
you can hear your past—the dead singing?
You can feel someone
touch your shoulder, her breath on your neck
when she leans in to ask
how much longer till you get where you’re going?
In this way, these memories both haunt and guide the speaker throughout the book’s three sections, which explore the speaker’s personal and familial experience with substance abuse, the physical and emotional challenges of being a guide, her relationship with the women, and the speaker’s own growth as a result.
The first poem of the first section, “River Crossing,” describes the speaker’s experience of her first week as a wilderness guide. In neat couplets—a form Ardery employs frequently throughout the collection—the speaker draws haunting parallels between the peril of a creek crossing, where one of the women momentarily slips under with her pack, and the danger the speaker survived in early childhood, when her father suffered from alcoholism: “When he shook / my head like a rattle, the silence he craved came sweet / but lasted brief as breath underwater.” Water is a motif that figures prominently throughout the collection, often representing the ubiquitous and unavoidable peril and precarity of recovery.
The second section of the book is its darkest, reflecting the mental challenges of working with recovering addicts in the wilderness during winter’s short days. Opening with a poem in which the speaker recognizes her own unhealthy relationship with alcohol, this section circles the temptation to give in to darkness. In the sonnet “Song of the River in Winter,” the speaker describes the audible rush of the river, stating forebodingly, “Tempting // this time of year to heed that lullaby for good. / Go to sleep, go to sleep. Go now. Sleep.” In “Snowed in at Base Camp on Valentine’s Day,” Ardery deftly employs metaphor, describing how the women “make snow angels— / each woman working to leave / some version of herself behind.” The mood of the section evolves, concluding with subtle hope: the “endorphin rush of spring” and the speaker feeling more at home with herself and the challenging work. “The wilderness,” the speaker reflects, “was teaching me more than I bargained for.”
The final section’s poems are contemplative, describing the later days of the speaker’s work in the program and life afterward. The tightly crafted pantoum “Nantahala Wildfire” exemplifies the section’s meditative mood:
The slate sky was dry as chalk
and when I smelled smoke, throat burning
from the blaze in the mountains,
I scolded myself for liking it.
That smell of smoke, throat burning
like a shot of vodka, meant destruction so
I told myself not to like it.
I worried the flames would jump a river.
Surely something so destructive
would spread. Whenever I drank,
I worried the flames would jump a river
like they’d done for my father.
The long poem “Shift Work” compares the speaker’s experience bussing tables after concluding her time as a guide to the vigilance required to keep the women in recovery safe, such as checking campsites for glass shards that could be used for self-harm. The reader finally learns the meaning of “level watch,” which is when “the escalated patient [is] within arm’s reach at all times.” The speaker remembers “A—,” a self-harming patient with “fresh red / cuts over raised white scars on her wrist,” and then learning of and processing her death. In sections that vary in form and length (couplets, tercets, projective verse) to reflect the varying demands and pace of work and memory, the speaker concludes that the pressures of her new restaurant job are far “easier than what I already carried.”
Ardery’s ability to observe and document the human and natural world in precise language infuses the collection with perspicacity. In the final poem, Ardery applies the unexpected metaphor of a tipped terrarium, imagining the women hiking together through its organic landscape in rich detail:
When night falls, they stitch strands
of sinewy poplar bark through heron feathers,
huddle beneath the makeshift tarp. Jagged
rose quartz blocks the jar’s mouth. The only
way out is to climb, squeeze through a sliver
of air and hike for as long as it takes to reemerge
level with the world that brought them here.
Level Watch is a cohesive, nuanced, and impressive debut collection, contemplating substance use disorder recovery, family and addiction, and the demands of vigilant caregiving against the haunting backdrop of mountains “alive with melancholy.” Elegiac yet quietly hopeful without clichés and truisms, Ardery’s collection may be especially valuable for readers who have experienced substance use disorder, cared for someone who has, or grew up in addiction’s long shadow. Or for anyone who has forged the challenging path to reinvention or offered attention and tenderness to someone else on theirs.
