New Poetic Forms Bewitch in Book of Potions https://ift.tt/6mdnRSW
Book of Potions, the new collection of hybrid works by Lauren K. Watel, comes with an equation that’s placed like a subtitle and serves as a map: “potion = poem + fiction.” Gifted with this, we immerse ourselves in the wondrous and lush world that follows, with none of the slow easing in that might otherwise be required. Watel begins and ends her series of potions with an unnamed speaker waking from a dream. Between these bookends, we traverse a feverish dreamscape, one that teeters at the edge of an abyss.
“I Awoke on the Edge” opens Book of Potions as the speaker rises on the edge of a snow-covered field “plated with sunlight.” There, she discovers a deep quiet: “…it wasn’t the snow that gave with my every step, it was the silence, how I sank into it up to my knees, the silence crackling around my feet, pulling me down with a sharp gravity, and I slogged through the silence, my breath shrouding my face…” Silence is a vital element in these potions: not just the quiet backdrop of landscapes but also the absence of sound in solitude, grief, and mental illness. In “I Lift My Hands,” our speaker longs for past generations to guide her, to give her a sign, but instead “…my ancestors are silent in their graves, as silent as the dirt you turn over in your child-sized fists, in search of heirlooms buried in the backyard.”
Essential sounds contrast against the swaths of quiet. “What Sounds” is, indeed, the title of not one but three of the potions (Watel uses repetition with great effect). These short works ring with insight. They also bring Watel’s gift for comparison and evocation into sharp focus: “What sounds like rain is tires on asphalt.”
Despite self-imposed constraints of size and shape, Book of Potions dips in and out of the intoxicatingly surreal with ease. Watel crafts a dream space where a skull on a desk speaks, queries, and even offers up advice: “Well, then grow up on the inside…”; a heart flares its talons and rattles the bars of its paper cage after being delivered through a mail slot; and a piece of toast, now consumed, yearns longingly for the toaster. The paintings of surrealist Leonora Carrington come to mind, with their juxtapositions of the fantastical and the everyday. Both artists are visionary, compelled to offer glimpses of their internal worlds. Both appear to wield magic. And, as in Carrington’s paintings, one suspects that many of the ethereal images in Potions bear the heavy weight of autobiography.
“If Only I Could Take” is a marvelous confection that begins with “If only I could take my head off for a while. If only I could put it on the nightstand…” Watel shines brightest when her poems are playgrounds. The speaker muses about taking her head off and setting it aside, like a pair of eyeglasses or a necklace, then thinks “I would probably put something else on my neck, so as not to alarm the neighbors. A tropical shrub might do.” One can’t help but visualize the poem as a painting, especially when the speaker playfully considers: “Or maybe something more fanciful, a paper lantern with a tea candle inside. At night I could light the candle, and my lantern head would lift off my body and into the darkness like a jellyfish rising through water.” One can even imagine it in Carrington’s strange and sometimes darkened palette. By the potion’s end, the narrator — delightfully— opts for leaving her “neck unadorned, like an uncapped pipe” into which people can drop coins and make wishes.
Foreboding, however, flavors much of Book of Potions. Amidst the oddities and wonders, stark narratives emerge. Wars loom, the climate warms, mental illness haunts. People — the speaker, for one, and much to her surprise — age. Things change, relationships fail. The speaker’s psyche knocks at the door of many of these poems, often with her dead father in hand. The dark mixes smoothly with the light in these brews.
Potions can heal, though, and mending seems to occur as the collection nears its end. The haunting and lovely “Go By, Go By,” can read as a meditation — or an incantation. Read though one lens, it appears the speaker has attained peace. Or maybe she is simply world weary, ready to finally let it all go: “The dust and the petticoats, the foundlings and the amputees, go by, float away and go by. The world is floating away. Go by, world, go by, off into the outer realms, off into the superfluous futures, which are branching continuous, like ivy sending tendrils across the floorboards.”
Watel’s potions are poetic prose, fictional verse, this-meets-that contained in blocks of text about a half page long and with no indentation in sight. Remarkably, this economical form can hold a human psyche, sometimes a whole world. There are so many questions here, and that is part of the magic and beauty of this work. The potions, that skull on the desk, they don’t have the answers. What these potions do have is the power to bewitch.
POETRY Book of Potions
By Lauren K. Watel
Sarabande Books
Published February 11, 2025
0 Commentaires