Wildlives by Sarah Jean Alexander
Wildlives is a 79 page book of poetry. It is a love book. Alexander's poetry reminds me of Zachary Schomburg and Sara June Woods' poetry in the sense that the writing feels fanciful, imaginative, twee, and loving. It's a book that makes me feel good about humanity, even (and maybe especially) when the tone becomes lonely and howling at the moon like.
Humans can carry a lot of love and affection inside them, it's one of the main arguments against mass extinction. Wanting to love someone and for someone to love you back can make a person vulnerable to a tremendous amount of pain and heartache, but I feel good knowing how people long to hold onto each other. It's a strength, not a weakness.
The word ‘we’ appears in the poems pretty frequently and for me the book very successfully evokes the state of being hopelessly tangled in love with another person. Here is an example:
Lead me into an old field of brown grass and crown stalks and hard and broken branches. We drag our feet and dust kicks out in a trail behind us, dead fleas and flies, swirling in baby tornadoes. Time sucks into the space that our bodies occupied the steps before and the steps before that and the steps before that. In the center of the field you tell me to stand with my arms at my side and say, Stay very still now, okay? Okay.
Here is another example, although this hits at things from the perspective of not being entangled with someone you love:
If it’s not too late
I’d like to apologize
…
for the unfair distance
that can exist between two people
in a small human world
and for eyes
that can’t swallow tears
or take deep breaths
the same way
that mouths can.
One last excerpt:
If that doesn't make you want to read the rest of Wildlives I'm not sure what else I can say. This is a very beautiful book.
