“Adam in the Garden” Challenges Narratives, Reminds of Magic and Mystery in the Everyday https://ift.tt/JKgBXmi
AE Hines’ Adam in the Garden is a personal, direct exploration of geography, nature, queer love and the Eden one creates through self-love and self-acceptance. Each poem is a careful step on a path guiding readers into self-awareness, rejection, childhood and adulthood. The poems incorporate and challenge traditional religious imagery and political structures, making each a quiet rebellion against the beliefs, ideologies and legislations which hinder, malign and oppress.
Poems like “Adam and Eve” are an inquiry and challenge to the traditional religious narratives which have shaped American society. In “Adam and Eve,” readers discover an Adam who seems quite comfortable, not only with his own nakedness, but also his own solitude. The speaker wonders if Adam “could feel the coming / change, marrow thickening // in his hastily assembled bones.” The brilliant enjambment snips lines so that words like “coming” develop a tongue-in-cheek tone entirely their own. In other lines, this enjambment creates a careful wordplay: “…Adam gave up on Paradise / too soon: started building parking lots.” Here, “Paradise” and “lots” work together to form a twisted, almost too quiet reference to Milton’s Paradise Lost. The images that follow provide a warning about how the nature cherished by Adam would, in the modern world, find itself overtaken and destroyed by condos, strip malls and atom bombs. This metamorphosis of the natural collides with images associated with evolution: “Too late, once the snake’s legs fell off— / four strange ornaments left hanging / in that abandoned tree.” Thus, the poem encompasses cycles of good, evil, questioning and change, both environmental and ideological, reminding readers that each is both necessary and inevitable.
As inflammatory conversations regarding immigration and border security dominate the United States’ political scene, the poem “Naturalization” establishes itself as immediate and indispensable. The speaker describes the harrowing experience of leaving Guatemala, alone, with a baby, describing U.S. immigration as an “electric barbwire” where “badged men and women // berate brown men in shackles.” The speaker utilizes words like “tethered” and “stiff” to build a scene where detained men “stared at their shoes.” Centering the poem is the speaker’s guilt:
I am embarrassed to admit
I did nothing.
Said nothing.
Didn’t catch
a man’s tired eye and offer
even a nod, a word
of my feeble Spanish.
The guilt not only centers the poem, but also acts as a point of disassociation and divergence. As the speaker and the baby are “ushered back” into America, the “detained, / deported” men are “on their way / to whatever place / they no longer come home.” The final lines open a conversation that few politicians are willing to acknowledge or even have — that many people who cross America’s borders in search of what it promises simply have no home to which to return.
LGBTQ rights and existence are also paramount in Adam in the Garden. “Sacramento 1994” depicts a scene in which the neighbor has called the police on the speaker and their lover. However, rather than being met by the police with hate and violence, the speaker and their lover are met with a quiet form of acceptance as the policewoman tells them, “‘You boys go right on having a wonderful day.’” Powerfully, the poem concludes with an image of resistance and resilience as the lovers lean from a window, their hands “gripping the sunbaked sill” and the speaker describes opening “the grateful cavity” of their throat and crowing in defiance and self-love.
“The Night the Lights Went Out in Moore County, North Carolina” references the December 2022 domestic terrorist attach which targeted an electrical grid in rural North Carolina. Rumors speculated that the attack occurred in response to a local drag show which was occurring at the time of the outage. Again, the speaker embraces the LGBTQ’s resilience and defiance, openly addressing the reader as “you.” The speaker asserts that “These must be dark times” if one thinks “shooting up a substation” and “blacking out / the lights will shut down a drag show.” The resilience and defiance gleams as the speaker asserts, “Yes, there will be singing. Even in the dark.” The speaker utilizes nature’s own resilience as a parallel for that of the LGBTQ community’s when facing oppression and atrocity, by incorporating a simple image of a tulip. They describe the tulip as “boozy and voluptuous,” standing with a “green / stiffened spine.” The tulip’s petals are “outstretched” and “outlasting gravity and death,” refusing “to bend.” The same utilization of nature’s defiance and adaptation appears in “Postcard from the Dead,” which focuses on another tragic event which shaped the LGBTQ community and the LGBTQ conversation in the United States — the murder of Matthew Shepard.
In “Postcard from the Dead,” the speaker adopts Matthew Shepard’s voice. The voice is clear and resistant as the speaker declares, “My killers thought I’d be forgotten.” The speaker notes that the murder actually had the opposite effect:
But for twenty years, for thirty far longer
than I was alive, our people remember
my name. It blooms
from their lips like a cold prairie rose.
A shared, collective experience, memory and grief emerges because of the phrase “our people.” The pronoun “our” is initially inclusive, but the speaker’s death and distance reinforce in the final line as the speaker describes the collective’s lips using the pronoun “their.” Nature, however, is a healing and resilient force, as portrayed by the “cold prairie rose” — an especially hardy and tough flower.
Adam in the Garden captures the queer experience across various decades, challenges conventions of form and ideology and reminds readers about the magic and the mystery which exists in the everyday experiences so few take time to contemplate and cherish.
POETRY Adam in the Garden
By AE Hines
Charlotte Lit Press
Published March 01, 2024
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