Mothman Apologia by Robert Wood Lynn. Yale University Press, 2022. 120 pp. $20.00 (paperback)

I came to Robert Wood Lynn’s Mothman Apologia, winner of the 2021 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, without knowing anything about the Mothman. Even though I grew up in the northern tip of Appalachia, the Mothman’s home turf, we were Sasquatch people. We believed in Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman. But Mothman? Never heard of him. So it was with great pleasure, and no shortage of pain, that I followed Robert Wood Lynn’s well-lit trail into Mothman territory.

Mothman Apologia is not a happy book, exploring, as it does, the darker sides of the Virginias: environmental destruction, the opioid crisis, gun violence, and the personal loss of a loved one. Lynn sets the tone early. From “(The Mothman Googles His Own Name):”

… I’d already / begun to doubt my own existence. How / did I come to live life as a warning? / Same as you: disappointment strung out // together in series, the way August’s / Christmas lights hang on to a mood. / Never off, never all the way on.

Disappointment strung out together in series is an understatement. And to chronicle the devastation wrought upon Appalachia, Lynn begins, where else, but in Rome. In “First of Ten Elegies for Fire and Oxycodone,” Lynn sets up the metaphor that carries throughout the book: Purdue Pharma, and the Sackler family, as the runners of an extortion racket.

In ancient Rome      fire departments worked like this      your house catches fire
someone shows up           with his own brigade of firemen              offers to buy
your house on the cheap      every second you wait the price drops…

Lynn makes this connection both explicitly and implicitly. Each of the “Ten Elegies” (there are eleven), contain two stanzas. The first stanza in each poem implicates the pharmaceutical industry, sometimes by allusion, sometimes by name, in the overall opioid epidemic. The second stanzas, each written in the second person, chronicle the destruction of a particular life.

I don’t      can’t      remember any of the details      of you catching fire      I know
it happened      because I saw the singed grass in the yard…

Here, in the “Eighth of Ten Elegies for Fire and Oxycodone,” we see Lynn more directly forging the links to Purdue Pharma. The speaker refers here to Dante’s Inferno:

                                                                                            … It’s a very long
poem          the gist          of the gist          of the gist of it          in case you don’t
have the time      the poet invents hell puts      all his enemies      in there by name…

…Crassus in the truck bed      chauffeured as billionaires do      could hear his teeth
now that the oxy faded        Arthur        and Mortimer         and Raymond Sackler
with him in the back       shitbirds      you could hear their teeth      you could hear
all their teeth           and no painkillers           from here on out           it just keeps
going          Prometheus and his eagle          this one long road over the mountains

Which is where the Mothman comes in. From “(The Mothman Googles His Own Name):”

The sleepless corners of the internet
call me a harbinger.

Lynn offers us the Mothman as an emergent consequence of all that has gone wrong in Appalachia, as a warning, an alarm bell that all is not right. From “(The Mothman Reads from The Book of the Dead):”

         … Listen. Mothpeople are warnings—ways
of naming a certain kind of hero. A warning is just
a hero that asks you to save yourself somehow.
Most times, it doesn’t work.

Lynn does not write in received forms, but the overall structure of the book is clearly intentional. Every third poem, sixteen of the forty-five in the collection, feature the Mothman as a first person speaker. Each of these poems bears a title in the form “(The Mothman …).” The titles of these sixteen poems, and only of these poems, are enclosed within parentheses and presented in a lighter-shaded font. Such typographic choices are perhaps meant to remind the reader that the Mothman is a mythical figure and so his words, his poems, are to be received with the gravitas of myth.

Another group of poems consist of the eleven elegies: “First of Ten Elegies for Fire and Oxycodone,” “Second of Ten Elegies for Fire and Oxycodone,” etc., all the way up through the “Eleventh of Ten Elegies….” Whereas a third group of poems, whose titles follow no obvious pattern, make up the remainder of the collection. It is across all three groups of poems that Lynn delivers, explains, and justifies the warning. This is an apologia after all.

Nowhere does Lynn better explain the emergence of the Mothman than in “(The Mothman Pronounces Appalachia).”

I say it Appalachia because there’s a goddamn latch in it
and folks from far off rush in with a correction: Appalayshia

they say, as if there is something about the latch they are afraid of.
As if it needs to be dashed like the o in G-d. As if they’re scared

that fiddling with it might knock a lid open and out of all these
mineshafts climb monsters, those of us they want to leave buried

under these hills. As if that hasn’t already happened. What is strip
mining if not a way of tearing a lid off this whole place? That’s not

a rhetorical question. How do you think I got out to begin with?

And though the mining industry is an easy target, Lynn does not stop there. A fair bit of blame is leveled at the common people of Appalachia themselves, their willful ignorance, their Christian exceptionalism. In “I Never Knew What They Meant by Flyover Country,” the poem opens:

until the first time someone put me on a plane, windowed me
into the congregation looking down on our fields stretched out
endless in orderly blanks, redactions in the transcript of the trial
of man versus nature. All this holy squinting at scrimshaw country
roads draped with power lines—trip wires lying in wait for the giants
we just sort of mice around.

And again, in the “Fourth of Ten Elegies for Fire and Oxycodone,” Lynn laments the lack of will to have dealt with the problems before they got out of hand.

how a mouse problem      becomes a snake problem      if you let it go long enough

In “Augury,” one from the third, seemingly unrelated, group of poems, we hear the speaker taking some responsibility for his own lack of awareness:

                         …As a child, I loved
to take refuge from a downpour in the deep
end of the pool. Practiced hiding
from something by immersing myself in it.

In Mothman Apologia, I hear the voice of an insider, a whistleblower. Lynn conveys this authenticity through his use of tone and language. Despite references to ancient Rome, Greek myths, and the Inferno, Lynn often writes in colloquial speech. “(The Mothman on the Bullshit Curse of Interesting Times)” begins:

Shit yeah, when I was younger I wished for awful things
to happen.

In “(The Mothman Might Oughta Go Home),” he once again addresses the use of language head on:

I say might oughta because oughta
knows it’s not nice enough on its own.
I say double modal so nobody leaves here
calling me names….
          …Language is a place trapped
in time and you may should watch your
mouth when you speak….

Lynn also gains our trust by painting the broader picture of what home, apart from the crises, looks like. In “(The Mothman Picks Up a Misdemeanor),” we see the context within which the whole disaster unfolds:

The worst true story is all valley towns
look the same. The same Wendy’s, the same
turn lanes, the same Days Inns lining
the same divided highways blooming
the same out of Main Streets like lichen….

Lynn does an excellent job elucidating the damage wrought on Appalachia and in ascribing blame where blame is due, but what makes this more than just a political diatribe is the sense of personal loss that the poems, particularly the elegies, reveal.

In each of the elegies, and outside of them as well, the speaker addresses a lost “you.” Here, in “Fifth of Ten Elegies for Fire and Oxycodone,” the speaker recalls the time after his friend caught fire:

                                                     …your gentleness    and my surprise at its
return    you called out to deer grazing    on the other side    of a fence as they
blurred by      gave them names      one by one of neighbors      I had forgotten
pain pills kept     you pretty loopy     I could hear your teeth as     they wore off

Where we hear not just the pills wearing off, but the teeth as well.

Mothman Apologia documents so much loss on the grand scale but, ultimately, it’s the loss on the personal scale that convinces. In “Sneaking onto the Reservoir Again,” we feel the aftermath of so much that went wrong:

          …August is still here but you’re not
so this time I paddle out alone, rowing the rare thing
easier without you….

In “Ninth Elegy for Fire and Oxycodone,” Lynn crystallizes both levels of loss, the personal and the regional:

                                   …turns out you can run around burning    nobody
notices    wave your arms    roll around    still no one believes you’re on fire

Read the Mothman Apologia. You can’t help but believe.