Contributor’s Marginalia: Catherine Pierce on “In a Land Where Everything is Already Trying to Kill Me, I Enter a New Phase of My Life in Which It Would Be Very Bad If I Died” by Claire Wahmanholm

Dear Claire,

I am writing this response in the form of a letter because a) I think we all need to be writing more letters, and because b) I felt so directly spoken to by this poem that a direct response felt like the most natural way to communicate that.

Seriously. This poem says pretty much everything I think every day. At future potentially-awkward conference/colleague/parent gatherings, I could tape this poem to my forehead while greeting everyone so that they’ll know the important things. And that is a rare and relieving reading experience to have.

But a good letter needs some specifics, and so, a brief list of what I love about this poem:

1) How it speaks to the wildness of motherhood and that type of love we’ve seen described as fierce or intense or any other adjective that never comes close. How, in this poem, that particular love is figured as a force one might as well give in to: “But the mother in me / has fallen in love with everything. I want to tell her / to shut her eyes, to keep her hands in her pockets, / but she must hold the child’s hand as she crosses the street.”

2) It is so hard to write a poem that includes the words child, duckling, heaven, mother, and sadness. It is also hard to write a poem that includes the words parasite, sandwich, death, choke, and tapeworm eggs. This poem uses every single one of those words in perfect balance with one another, and the effect is gutting and precise and funny as hell.

3) The dynamic pacing here, and in particular the line “Everything is bearing down, / bearing down,” which acts as a sort of whole-note rest, a dark, still meditation before we return to the forward propulsion.

4) The bravery of that final declaration/confession: “I have not left her any white stones / to follow out of this forest.” That acknowledgment that once we are in the “sweet / dangerous darkness,” we are in it and there is no going back. The unstated implication that even if we could leave the white stones, we would not.

5) The honesty that acts as this poem’s engine, how it revs and zooms the poem forward. “Once I am dead, / I won’t know it, but that doesn’t help. I already miss living—/ all its bells and tulips and feelings.” YES, poem, ME TOO.

6) THAT TITLE.

This is a poem that makes me feel less alone. This is a poem that makes me feel braver about forests and speeding trucks and potentially lethal sandwiches and my own vast love with its teeth and bells and tulips. Thank you for it.

Yours in the rapture and terror mentioned in Line 2,
Katie