wild lives by sarah jean alexander
WILD LIVES BY SARAH JEAN ALEXANDER
brought this to the US with me as well; had got this in may but hadn’t felt ready to read until two days ago; i guess partly bc it’s written by sarah and it’s her first book and so i want to give it the attention it deserves/not read it casually, and also bc i knew it would be emotional, and wanted to be ready to be overwhelmed. felt grateful to have these in my hand and glad that it was as emotional and overwhelming as i thought it would be
the poem the book opens with the poem ‘Holes’
Holes
‘If I look into your blue eyes for long enough and if I am
determined enough, will some of the colors in your irises
detach and float through space in a slow enough fashion
that they don’t get lost in a wind drift, and can they gently
settle on the wet brown hills of my two eyes so that I
begin to look a little bit easier and feel a little bit lighter?
Then twenty years from now people will ask me, How did
you get the color of the sky to live inside the holes in your head
when the rest of you is so dark? and I can look at them and
say, I once loved another human a little too much and this is all
that he gave me in return.
feel like this poem sets the tone for the rest of the book – the way its willing to state, in unambiguous terms, ‘I once loved another human a little too much and this is all that he gave me in return’.. it’s so beautiful and rare to encounter such vulnerability in poems. like, when the writer loves, she loves hard– reading them makes you wish you were always as open abt the parts of you that hurt from loving as much as she does
the ones i liked best were the ones abt relationships/with a fixed other or ‘you’ that was being addressed. in describing these poems as generous it is also describing the way the writer gives/shares all of herself with the people she loves. there is a line from another poem where she ‘kissed each stone to say thank you’ and like that love is something she extends to the small things co-existing with her that she is grateful for
it’s especially nice to have heard sarah read a few of these aloud and then to read them again, hearing her voice
I said, One time I had a very
good friend named Arielle and I told you about how Arielle
and I worked together for a short amount of time before
she left for school in a state that was far away from where
we worked. I had only known her for two months and had
not thought of her in over a year. I asked, Do you ever try
to remember all of the people you’ve forgotten? You said, I don’t
know. I guess I figured people stopped existing when they aren’t
around me anymore and I said Yes, I feel that way about you.
folded the page after reading the line/her response ‘yes i feel that about you’ - it makes the poem take a very sharp and sudden turn, makes you hold your breath/re-read the line, to understand what she means/what the writer is revealing about her emotions towards the person she’s with
the poem where the writer walks into an empty old field and the person she’s with tells her to hold very still and she says ok and he begins to place sticks, twigs, branches around her until its a mountain and she’s at the centre of it and then tosses a match towards her and walks away, that fucked me up / made me cry
