Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry
Touch With Your Eyes: The Accomplice, Talismanic Poems of Each Luminous Thing, by Stacie Cassarino (Persea, 2023)
The Upstate, by Lindsay Turner (University of Chicago Press, 2023)
BY LISA RUSS SPAAR
A typical essay review in this series that considers second collections of poetry would pair a recently released sophomore book with a second book published at least twenty years ago, with the aim of examining, up close and in hindsight, what a particular poet’s second act might augur or signify, and also for the pleasure of reading in tandem two books with illuminating synergies. Occasionally, however, as I did a couple of times during the early period of the pandemic, when review copies were piling up unread in empty offices, but also when a wealth of fine second books crossed my desk for review, I choose to focus solely on two or three recently released second volumes in order to give them some current attention.
The Online Etymology Dictionary reminds us that the usual understanding of the word “accomplice” as an “associate in crime” is actually an unetymological extension of complice “an associate or confederate,” from the Latin complicare “to involve,” literally “fold together” (from com “with, together” + plicare “to fold, to weave). In this sense of association, of alliance, Stacie Cassarino’s Each Luminous Thing and Lindsay Turner’s The Upstate strike me as accomplice texts. Each, in its respective ways, offers up poems that are prayers, spells, and talismans for what is beloved and beautiful, particularly in the natural world, despite precarities of culture, the planet, affairs of the heart, and the limits and complicity of language itself in any form of making: a child, a home, a poem.
Cassarino’s sexy, provocative debut collection of poems, Zero at the Bone, published by New Issues Press in 2009, received both a Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lorde Award. She is also the author of a scholarly monograph, Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature (OSU, 2018). She earned a PhD from UCLA and teaches literature and creative writing at Smith College.
Her long-awaited second collection, Each Luminous Thing, was the 2022 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award winner, published by Persea Books earlier this year. There aren’t a lot of “edible images” in Each Luminous Thing, (some references to apples, maple sap, and blueberries, a pot of winter soup) but the poems shimmer with details of the various terrains the poet has inhabited—all manner of the flora and fauna (mustard stalks, jasmine, black sage, red maids, fossils)—shorelines, mountains, and fields in places as various as California, New York City, Brazil, and Vermont. If there is an arc to track in the book it might be a seasonal one, as the poems move (in an episodically non-linear way) from June to the start of spring. Their chief subject, though, is motherhood, specifically queer, single motherhood, and the terrifying, sometimes overwhelming, ever surprising ways in which that experience affects the soma, the self, one’s interactions with and new appreciation for the ephemerality of every living thing. Zero at the Bone contended with loneliness and longing—for love, for belonging, the (im)possibilities of erotic intimacy—and these preoccupations carry over into Each Luminous Thing with fresh urgency as the speaker falls into helpless and seismic unconditional love with the three daughters whom she must protect and nurture as best she can.
The bodily implications for the speaker are intense. “My body for so long // was only a verb: to swallow,” she writes in “End of September,” but in “3 A.M. Sestina After the Birth,” the mother’s body becomes ecstatically plural and reciprocal (and it is here that we see the body as food, nourishment, milk as the primal mind):
Then we were home, alone together, a mother
and her babies, and we were all of us hungry, our body
couldn’t get enough, we lost track of time,
it was always almost morning, I prayed it would come, my hands
their lips my breasts their eyelids, the space of light
between us, rooting in a half-sleep, slipping into dark.
I won’t leave out the mother on her knees crying, too, in the dark
or what I might have sung, lullaby of generous wind, if I were the mother
I thought I could be, to soothe them, to carry them into the light
as only a mother can with her one body
alone and release it all to them. Those nights my hands
pressed their mouths to take from me every sweet drop of time.
And they did. And we floated there in the dark beyond time.
Imagine the mother they made me. Full are my hands,
and those are the beams of my body. And they are rare sources of light.
Though nearly every poem in the book is driven by a powerful wish to protect and nurture the speaker’s beloved children, the poems never lapse into sentimental or patent tropes of motherhood. The speaker understands that she cannot fully know her children or anticipate how they will understand her or the world they share. In “Moonrise Over Mountains,” the speaker carries her eldest daughter out to show her the moon after supper (the little girl is wearing only a shirt because “she peed her pants while I was clearing the dishes,” but the mother believes that “my body alone can warm her”). Finally, the daughter admits that, sure, it’s all beautiful out here, but I’m cold and want to go back into the house. “I take her inside: dirty plates, smell of piss, whining, etcetera. How careless to think I could be enough. Or that this could be less than everything.” The poems are rife with losses—deaths of family members and friends, ended marriages and love affairs—but also people and places lost or marred by cultural environmental causes—wildfires, mass shootings. Perhaps most moving is the way the mother in these poems attends to the transient world and her own children’s physical immediacy despite “the loneliness I will hide from my children as long as it takes” (from “Dreamscape After the Shooting”). Part of that loneliness must come from the poet’s realization that not even language (“words that trick us”) can create a single notion of family, of belonging, of home, as she writes in “LA Translations,” a meditation on the verb “to leave,” addressed to a lover:
A word can be borrowed,
though we are likely invaders.
With zero derivation, I put the roots
back to back. It is never enough.
I want to believe in home.
There is no grammatical future.
We are resplendent, we are partial,
then we are gone. I don’t know
the word that brings us back.
What is it, then, that helps us keep walking, living, growing despite the devastations that continually “[restore] the sorrows that love / cannot dismantle”? After walking with her children through snow to view the site of a cattle barn fire, the speaker writes,
. . . I see rivers of milk.
I see the scar of barn. And yet, who
would not choose to be born? Beauty,
I’m not sure if you’re the pasture
that erases my feet or the lighted sky
under which I long to be found.
(from “Northeastern Tracks”)
Perhaps it is this attending to the beauty that persists and surprises that is the answer. “Listen for it,” she writes, to herself, in “Prelude to a Daughter on the Norske Trail”:
as you move
with the speed
of two wills.
And in “Phenology of Home,” Cassarino writes:
I will stand with my child
in a field of mud
until we can’t feel our feet
and know there’s nowhere
to move but towards each other.
There’s no one else I can love
as well. And those hills, the first yellow
blaze of weeds we call flowers, which
eventually become the silvery stars we breathe
away, and unlike so few things
do not require our attendance
to flourish.
*
Poet, scholar, and translator Lindsay Turner’s first book, Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018), was lauded for its formal innovations and blend of lyricism and social conscience. Her translations from French poetry include books by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Stéphane Bouquet, Frédéric Neyrat, Richard Rechtman, and Ryoko Sekiguchi. Her translation of Bouquet’s The Next Loves was longlisted for the National Translation Awards, shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award, and named a New York Times top 10 poetry collection of 2019. Originally from northeast Tennessee, she holds a PhD from the University of Virginia and lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Case Western University.
Like Each Luminous Thing, The Upstate is a collection of talismanic poems for people and places endangered and vulnerable (in fact, the second section of the book is titled “Spells & Charms”). It also attends closely to the natural world, human and animal—specifically to the Anthropocene of the Appalachian South—and to the seasons and how climate change has affected them (“the seasons themselves felt annulled like a marriage,” she writes in the first of her “Tennessee Quatrains”). One senses, too, that the speaker is living through a miasmic season of her own, a depression brought on, in part, by living for a time in a very “red” part of the south (the “upstate” of the title is a rural, conservative area in northern South Carolina) during a period of political divisiveness and increasingly acute global economic disparities surrounding income and consumerism. This emotional malaise makes the title ironic—the speaker is far from an “up” state of mind.
To return to the notion that Cassarino and Turner’s book are accomplice pieces for a moment, it is possible to fit Turner’s concern with national notions of “parenting” or governance,
The question is who does your money come from
The question is whose loss
The question is whose loves are torn like wet paper for your money
Whose lines are crossed by it
Why can’t live the thing she wants which is good and reasonable
Because of your money
(from “The Capitals”)
in an essential and origami-like way, and with similar anxieties and hopes, into the world of what’s at stake in Each Luminous Thing. Interestingly, Turner has three poems titled “Accomplice” in her book, in which she explores the blurred line between culpability and responsibility. Imagine, she ponders at the close of the third “Accomplice,”
walking without money
friendship without money
money without death without the deaths of anyone
money without death
The poems in the “Upstate” section of the book evoke powerfully a locale in which “a coffee from the QuikTrip [is] full of chemicals,” animals roam with “bloodied muzzles,” canines are maimed in dog fights, and the sky and even the water are red with toxic waste (“phthalates and parabens / circling like drones”)—a place, Turner writes, where “[y]ou fill out forms and then you die” and “[t]he trees glowed but it felt like the end of air.” Details like these help Turner make very clear to us that while the environment she’s inhabiting is, in fact, imperiled geographically, her sense of anxiety and fear is also reflective of places within her as well as the place in which she is trying to survive. A specific kind of despair involving anomie, dislocation, and the marketplace is deeply felt in this tercet, for example:
When the leaves blew against the windshield
The volume was turned all the way down
If nothing works out, I guess you could just volunteer somewhere . . . .
In “Overlook,” the speaker brings language itself into the equation. “Verb,” the part of speech evoking action, is wrested bravely into the speaker’s struggles, evoking, for me, the last stanza of Seamus Heaney’s magnificent political poem, “Oysters” (“I ate the day, / Deliberately, that its tang / Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb”):
Overlook
this is now
the anxiety you never chose
in the mountains, mountain ash
find the verb for how you lost
in the mountains, mountain ash
red berries flashed out in the dry brush
find the verb and suffer it
with someone else—
find the verb and suffer it
drove through where the paper mill
suffer the anxiety and the election
of the fools—
in the air the paper mill
released it all into the air
sunlight tangled in the air
and down the mountain—
has anyone checked up on the air
did you think you got to choose
does anyone ever get to choose
and still end up together
drove through mountains in the drought
suffer through the verb together
this is what you didn’t choose
and what might outlast
The Upstate is a world off-kilter, where tenses shift and expected nocturnal and diurnal patterns are distorted. Yet despite these intense evocations of cultural and personal depression and worry, the narrator in these pieces is not inured to moments of beauty, even guarded hope. “The dry leaves on the floor in the hallway scared me,” she writes in the first “The Upstate,” “Maybe like love as it curled somewhere deep in the chest.” In another poem, also called “The Upstate,” even as the speaker wonders how she and her partner can “survive / living in the place I left by choice,” she notes the “roadside goldenrod / season of contentment / of the beast.”
In the “Spells & Charms” section of the book, Turner extends personal concern into concern for others in poems like “Charm for J,” “Charm for W,” “Charm for the Neighborhood,” and “Charm for G,” a poem possibly referring to an August 2008 stabbing at a Regal Inn in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, but also, for this reader, evoking the death of George (“G”) Floyd:
pearl all night
yellow violence in the grass
I don’t know how you could fight them
had a thought, lost it
don’t take the debt they offer you
stabbed in the neck at the Regal Inn
in the yellow of the air
blisters from the new used shoes
what should be circling is circling
August you neurotic hallucination
at the top of the building, unrelated
that the sunset only be credible, credible
*
I’ve been calling the accomplice poems of Cassarino and Turner talismans, prayers, what you will. And I think that what I mean by this is that both turn their personal despair—loneliness, fear, anxiety—into poems that emanate a kind of intentional, generous worrying on behalf of others, dire concern annealed by a tenderness for the vulnerable denizens of the planet. In “Fireflies in Vermont,” Cassarino writes,
. . . Let me remind
you what I am here for. My breasts
are still sticky with milk, the babies
are finally asleep. Every-
thing that must be cared for
is in reach. If I was never one
for prayer,
why do I want to lower us to the earth
for a closer look? . . . .
Turner puts it this way in “Song of Accumulation”:
I was in another state when it happened
long since left out under the sky
I felt the glass grow lighter in my hand
I thought, I should pay more attention to what’s strange
so long since out under the sky at night
some white streaks then just nothing
there’s an office for change and there’s one for savagery . . . .
Turner chooses paying attention as a means for choosing change. Ditto for Cassarino. In her elegy for a friend in “Half-Life in Spring,” she writes:
You were always praying to be reborn.
Look at my daughter hanging from that one bending branch
with the breath of your wings, and her animal reckoning:
conciliatory, enraptured, unknowing.
Life, for her, can only be literal, so when I tell her you will die
of happiness, of course I mean live, not die.
Live, not diminish
from the pain of too much infinite beauty. How many ways can I remember
you? Touch with your eyes I tell her, marvel at the thing
as if you were never coming back
again. Let it shine on you.
