Lisa Wells, _The Fix_

HER FIRST BOOK, and arrives with noteworthy recommendations: the Iowa Poetry Prize and blurbs from D. A. Powell, Brenda Shaughnessy, Timothy Liu, and Shane McCrae.

It's a drilling-down kind of book, reminding me a bit of Heaney's North in its short lines, its one-word titles, its willingness to peer into the abyss.

It's also a book of close shaves. In "1989" the speaker recalls the time "I attempted to defect // to the lion enclosure, stuck neck-deep in the bars / the pride stirred, rose upon their haunches," a memory juxtaposed with that of a moment of brinksmanship on a subway platform, "When the ravening out of the darkness speeds / and the bad star advances in the channel [...]".

The speaker has spent some times on the margins--"I've come to kneel / on the filthy kitchen floor / of the punk squat"--and gone in for some high-risk behavior: "we feel the subcutaneous lace / of strychnine unstitching in fitful / intervals." Things have at times appeared to have gone irretrievably wrong--"Deep in my circadian clock / the seasons wheel / but something stays / / displaced." But perhaps not utterly irretrievably:

Mother, in your hands
my head
is not such a bad creation.

I mean, the fault's not
in your fingers.

If I could just retrace
my steps and

find the fix.
Knock it in me.

In a few spots some kind of fix seems to have been found. Two different poems are titled "Revelations," two more titled "Resurrections," and images of germination and growth recur: "To the tightly wound stem / pushing through dark earth / / unfurling when finally you feel the sun" ("BEAST"), "A seed is a box water opens" ("Resurrections II").

Maybe something is going to work out after all. Just as Heaney's line opened up in Field Work, so Wells's line does in more recent work (which I've only heard read aloud, but the lines sounded longer). There's a thin, bright ribbon of hope dangling down in the abyss, not enough to hang onto, but one is glad it's there.