Debut Collection Captures the Struggle of Carrying Physical and Emotional Weight https://ift.tt/jZMbaU5
Editors note: A trigger warning has been added to the beginning of a paragraph that mentions physical abuse.
Beauty and brokenness intermingle in Mary Ardery’s debut poetry collection, Level Watch, which focuses on an alternative substance abuse program for women that involves backpacking through the wilderness. The path to recovery becomes a literal trail through the wooded mountains of North Carolina, offering a means of facing the self while building strength in the process.
The speaker of the collection draws deeply from Ardery’s own experience as a wilderness guide, providing a memoir-like journey navigating the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the most important terrain is that which remains unseen: the battlefield of addiction and trauma the women face. Throughout the collection, the speaker is haunted by the dead women who didn’t make it and her own family history with alcoholism.
In “Learning Curve,” the speaker recalls the “recurring dreams where my mother kept dying,” as she curls “inside my mother’s sleeping bag.” The goose down feathers would float “in my tent like I’d slaughtered a bird.” “Sometimes I found a feather in my hair and blew it to the sky / like a dandelion, like a wish.” The lightness of feathers and wings is a recurring image in these poems, but the opening image is one of death.
The dead continue to reappear, often ominous, never comforting, as in the poem “Wilderness First Survival Training,” where “You dream a row of ruptured femurs / breaking through the ground. Bones / like the stakes of a white picket fence.” They reappear in “Backcountry Incantation” when “the therapist tells me about A—’s suicide” and the speaker asks, “How could she be dead when I could still hear her snoring beside me?” Despite the unreality of such loss, the speaker must continue with the job, trudging “deeper into the backcountry. Relentless, how it all goes on.”
There’s a beautiful coupling of the natural world, which gives life and nurtures but is also fierce and unpredictable. Nature demands one’s full attention in order to survive, and this potential peril is often present in the poems. Yet, Ardery appreciates the beauty it provides as well. This striking tension in the natural world often mirrors or conflicts with the internal world of the women in recovery.
Musing about the color of the Blue Ridge, in the ghazal titled “Asheville,” the speaker says, “…I believe the land’s alive with melancholy.” And she shares this truth learned the hard way, “Wherever you find recovery, you’ll find relapsing as well.” The duality of the success stories and the losses, the beauty and the brokenness, are signatures of this collection.
In “River Crossing,” rain has been hammering the Pisgah Forest, making the river dangerous to navigate, yet the guides and women step into it anyway. “…This is for my kids,” one woman says before “…she stepped // into the current, hip belt unbuckled in case she stumbled. / In case the pressure pulled her and her backpack down.” The “swollen river” does “yank the woman down” but before she is rescued, she pushes “up on her own…still [bearing] the weight of her pack.”
While it’s not always easy to recognize trauma or see the internal conflicts of those recovering from addiction, Ardery does make it easy to understand the struggle of these women who carry 50-pound packs through terrain that demands respect and constant vigilance. As is written in “Compassion Fatigue,” “…the worst injuries are internal.”
In another poem, “Snowed in at Base Camp on Valentine’s Day,” a woman confesses to knowing where they are because “sirens had screamed down these roads / three times for her alone, the EMTs rushing / to shock her heart back to its routine.” Once the group makes it to base camp, they “make snow angels— / each woman working to leave / some version of herself behind.” It’s quite beautiful to think of the human desire to leave a mark of one’s existence on the world and the need to shed the old parts of oneself in order to grow. The highly personal and vulnerable poems like this one that focus on one moment of realization are among the best in the collection.
[Trigger warning] Alongside the risk in navigating the natural world is the speaker’s acknowledgment of her own history where her father “drove us drunk, three daughters / in the backseat, our small hands sticky from McDonald’s…” before he chose a path to recovery. The speaker recognizes her own distressing childhood in which her drunk father shook her “head like a rattle” to obtain “the silence he craved…”
Ardery uses this back-and-forth lens of looking outward and looking inward throughout the collection. This is unsurprising, as self-awareness and examination are critical skills for any therapist. In a double-abecedarian, the speaker considers her own problematic relationship with alcohol, “Some nights, sloshed on South Slope. Too hungover for the Alabama Shakes. / Ticket in my purse but I was home dry-heaving…I told my more put-together roommate it was the flu…” Her own history of sobriety is explored but never faced as directly as those in rehabilitation. It lends an additional point of tension and perspective to the collection.
Overall, Ardery’s writing is clear and accessible. Her narrative poetry will appeal to an audience who enjoys memoir or poetic nonfiction as well as to fans of the topics explored in Robert Wood Lynn’s Mothman Apologia. The poems fluctuate between drawing the reader in close and holding at arm’s length. Occasionally, it feels like the poems take a reporter’s stance, describing the scene from a distance and allowing the speaker to hide, but the subject matter is always treated with care. Level Watch winds through rugged, emotional terrain: beautiful, brutal and unforgettable. Ardery’s debut is both a memoir of survival and a meditation on what it means to carry weight — literal and metaphorical — and to keep walking anyway.
POETRY Level Watch
By Mary Ardery
June Road Press
Published September 23, 2025
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