A Poet Longs for Another Home, Another Body, in “Let the Forest Go” https://ift.tt/KanVvZT
Following Justin Wymer’s debut collection Deed, published in 2019, Let the Forest Go: Poems is “a memoir in poetic fragments,” an edited transcription of the intimate diaries the author kept during his time abroad from 2015 to 2017. In the Spanish cities of Palencia and Ourense, he was “sickened by beauty” and horrified by the news he heard of home, particularly the rise of Donald Trump, whom he calls, simply, the Beast.
Home, for Wymer, is West Virginia. He was relieved to be at a great distance from home even as he longed for it: “What I found was that Appalachia is not simply a shifting geographic border, subject to the frivolity of politics, but rather a way of perceiving the world, even from a continent away.”
Now a professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Wymer published a superb essay on Literary Hub in 2024, soon after a fellow Ivy League graduate paraded his mother at the Republican National Convention. Beverly, the mother of JD Vance, looked visibly embarrassed in a harrowing close-up as her son crowed about her ten years of sobriety. One wonders if she would have been invited if she had still been using and unpresentable.
In striking contrast, Wymer writes with great sensitivity — in both his essay and in his new poems — of his family, who have mostly lost their battles with addiction. Both the 2024 and his newest essay are highly recommended reading as background for Let the Forest Go, and the following from the former deserves to be quoted in full, for it still rings true two years later:
I, and many others who reckon with the contradictions of Appalachia, must negotiate publishing politics before we try to prove a politician wrong through narrative. We’re Sisyphus waiting to roll our boulder up the hill. These complicated stories of nuance don’t sell, nor do they pander to the craving for stereotypes that Vance’s appetizing blend of easy tropes, rags-to-riches, and exceptionalism inspires.
Nothing that Wymer writes of in Let the Forest Go is appetizing, but it is true, and unforgettable.
Divided into three sections, Wymer’s poems vary in mood, length, and structure, but the general tone is intensely self-reflective. Each poem is born from the breaking heart of an Appalachian in exile. Under the warm Spanish sun, West Virginia haunts him. Home is where “they’ve run out of names for churches,” and dogmas are set “to music like an eloquent scolding, slowed to opioid-calm, and long.” Kind, exuberant, disinterested strangers with European sensibilities soothe him for a while, but memories of family and the scars they left him are never far from his mind: “The devil’s lonely. This much I’ve learned. That’s why he’s everywhere, like moisture in the bronchi, ham hock in the cooking.”
Two of his most moving poems are “[Notes on creating a new world]” and “a disturbed boy.” These are his elegiac attempts to convince himself that his worth is more than his place of origin, family history of addictions, or his outward appearance. “What’s left when I give up the need for beauty?” This is one of the most moving refrains in his book, his longing for beauty and his longing to be beautiful, his repeated sinking in self-loathing — “a sense of worth like cloud-wisp” — which is reflected by every mirror, every memory of his childhood of both standard and extreme Southern domestic horrors. “I wanted to be beautiful / so wrote into beauty / till it bled… so I searched trees / for tenderness.”
Despite discussions of the casual cruelty wrought by poverty, addiction, and bigotry, Wymer’s poems are still embroidered with delicate touches of humor that are never without feeling, such as: “My dearest West Virginia, pink camo is atrocious and should not adorn the woman smoking like an unkempt chimney beside her oxygen machine.”
Identity is at the core of Wymer’s poems — and the source of his most lyrical verses. While in Spain for two years, he “became acutely aware of my queerness, which was somehow linked to my Appalachianness.” To be different, to be a queer poet and still “a southern gentleman,” as he quips in one poem, is to be hyperaware that he is the antithesis of blue-collar Appalachia: silent and stoic… and toxic. “What is it to be alone in abundance — to ward off real-life models of human because you broke the rule.”
Midway through the Beast’s second term, Let the Forest Go is highly recommended reading, and not just as an alternative to Vance’s recently published (and deservedly panned?) second memoir. Wymer’s poems are for readers who want to know the truth — liberating, crushing, and sobering — about one of the most maligned regions of the United States. Vance may be many things, but he will never be accused of being a poet. Wymer is, and he will never be anything less than one of the most resplendent songbirds to ever sing of the splendors and horrors of his native land, even as he creates a new world. “We can’t numb out and stay quiet, or we’ll forget our histories, which is what they want. So let’s sing together. Our songs are evidence of life lived.”
POETRY Let the Forest Go: Poems By Justin Wymer University Press of Kentucky Published June 2, 2026
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