Christian Wessels’s intricately wrought debut, Who Follow the Gleam, brims with sendings: supernatural interventions that create like-but-not versions of the original. Spells populate the text, calling upon versions of beloveds transformed through reanimation and sympathetic magic. Children improvise on inherited legacies. Names repeat throughout—Tanja, Dinah, Lola—themselves imperfect doubles: not the person as they live, but an empty box of phonemes that becomes filled by the attributes relayed in a poem. Crafted representations of a life abound, including stories, spells, and the poems themselves. In Wessels’s work, poems are practices that occur alongside a life as opposed to phenomenological containers for life. The book is concerned with how we filter the experiences that pass through us onto and into others.
Wessels’s speakers face many inheritances—familial stories and traumas, genetic legacies like asthma, poetic lineages of Auden, Yeats, Höderlin—and thus a choice: whether and how to convey what’s been passed on to them. In the book’s opening sequence, a prose block diptych establishes the lineage of an American son, half Italian and half German, his parents vying to impact him most: “persuading their children to identify with one culture before another. Who was more the bad guy in the war, what did you learn in school, what is your attitude toward romance and violence.” The son’s “perfect day,” a pastiche of allegedly “Old World” German food and adolescent Americana, is presented to him without a choice in the matter. In other contrasting poems, the speaker passes lessons onto a daughter, Lola, without the same absoluteness. The speaker remains in awe of Lola’s agency and her capacity to change or contradict: “You will one day transform into other Lolas: / one will swim without inflatables, another will learn to spot weather // symptomatic of violent tides and avoid swimming.” The version of Lola that swims without inflatables and the version that avoids swimming complicate each other, much like the shimmering panels of the sequence poems that anchor the debut. The speaker remains reluctant to circumscribe Lola’s becoming as she learns to speak: “all day she does not stop screaming— / not because she’s in pain, but because / she loves the possibility for her voice.” Love of possibility is more important than a neatly delineated life or person. Worth mentioning: there’s yet another Lola tucked in the book, Oma Lola. This Lola is a different person in a different stage of life, yet doubled personhood further anchors Lola-ness in multiplicity and expansion.
Wessels resists the trope of gaining immortality through both constructed language—a “great work”—and children. Neither a poem nor a child becomes a vessel for their “maker’s” will or selfhood. Neighboring poems two-thirds of the way through the collection provide harmonious endings that refuse certainty. First, “the sound is a memory as it happens as it happens / it’s already passed our daughter is fifty // I am dead as I have long been dead.” Then, “You have nowhere to outlive yourself.” The point of making is not a stable legacy but the capacity for radical transfiguration.
Who Follow the Gleam’s “I” speaker is rarely singular, instead blurred into multitudes. Some pieces recall the subjective soup of early childhood, when the brain attempts to figure out its relation to the world but the boundaries between self and other are not clearly defined: “a solemn / visceral empathy that only / children feel to that degree.” Poems unspool kinship: speakers relay and improvise on stories inherited from poets, teachers, and omas. The book’s characteristic sequence form dabbles in mimesis, simultaneity, and fracture. Wessels’s poems are polyvocal—in name like “Gesualdo, in Five Voices,” and in deed like “Sympathetic Magic from the Black Forest,” where the speaker becomes fairy tale goose girl, father, and trickster. Each poem engages new ways of relating that modulate the interlocking consciousnesses propelling the book.
The making of poems/spells in this collection is a collective, embodied pursuit. Made things aren’t meant to be static, but to enliven and animate my/your/our relational web. In the poem “Reanimation Spell in a Brine Jar,” a dead beloved does not return for good. There is no final, permanent reanimation. But a dream affords a new kind of relationality. Even though the addressee is still dead at the end, the speaker is granted knowledge that exists beyond the empirically known, thus new intimacy with the passed: “a young man watching the spectacle of your body / escorted to the ambulance; it was covered, / though somehow I knew your shirt was untucked. / The hard part is remembering what I do not know.” A final result is not the purpose of these incantations. The acts of passage and connection—and the accruing transformations that come with intimacy—are the fruitions of made things.
Neither is strict realism the point of creation. A poem is a vessel to convey, but never to provide absolute truth. Wessels elaborates on the possibilities and contradictions of making in the poem “Against Birds.” The speaker—‘you’ this time, another switch of selfhood—steps on a dead bird and “cannot forget, so you record it first / by telling the story to your wife, then / your friend, and with each retelling / the collapse feels less real, less real.” The record does not equal reality, which spills forward in the quatrains indented ever further from the left margin.
Language is manipulated to describe the manipulation of language. This thread is picked back up in “Natural Questions:” “Does honesty in a poem feel / physical . . . Does lying / in a poem feel like being honest.” Throughout the book, Wessels tests the difference between a told thing and a physically felt thing. A poem is told, we want to tell it, but we can never perfectly describe reality in the telling. Instead, the made object invites a different kind of (re)experience whose point is its improvised variation, not its fidelity.
The collectivity and mutability of the work of passage is acknowledged in “Our Snail.” Multiple inheritances occur. The poem is delivered in quotes by a figure who remembers their father telling them stories as a child in Germany. They mention a specific story—about a snail too slow to arrive at a book convention—in another nested set of quotes. But in the telling, the children listening intervene: “We needed / our snail to make it to Leipzig; our father knew / this and began to revise in real time.” The father changes the ending to suit his young listeners; the book convention moves to meet the snail. One listener, now grown, tells the story of the story. The listeners participate in the act of making, just as readers are invited to participate in the book by the shift of the “I” speaker to “you” in some poems.
Who Follow the Gleam resists sure record and static form. Wessels’s work is committed to radical agency for made things (and we are all made and making things, inheriting lineages and shaping the inheritances of others). Children, families, language, and spellcraft unfurl relentlessly into the future.
