by Claire Jussel
March 1, 2023
Claire Jussel is a poet, writer, and artist from Boise, Idaho. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in West Trade Review, Wizards in Space, Split Rock Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and SEISMA Magazine. She currently resides in Ames, Iowa where she is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University.
I'd Rather be Lightning by Nancy Woo; Gasher Press; 128 pgs.; $19.00
Not to be dramatic, but some days, it feels like we are living in the end times. What are we to do when glimmers of the apocalypse seem to be crashing into reality (catastrophic floods, pandemics, and near-sentient AI…) while life continues as real and mundane as ever? Early in the collection, we find the speaker musing ,“dancing around / the kitchen, I sometimes worship / apocalyptic woes—cockroaches, tin roof rain, end of days…” Living through such days is like trying to dance along when you don’t know the choreography and the ground is lava. Throughout her first full length poetry collection, I’d Rather Be Lightning, Nancy Lynée Woo attempts to dance along. From an epigraph featuring a Rhianna lyric, to a fourteen part “Mediation on Chaos” at the center of the book, her poems set out to meet our moment of climate catastrophe with sincerity and directness, and succeeds in finding movement, beauty, and sustenance within the same beat as disarray and devastation.
The poems that follow are fitting companions for strange times. Woo does not sugarcoat the brutality of climate calamity nor does she trap us in doom and gloom. Her poems shimmy into a nuanced space between anxiety and hope, and aren’t afraid to go technicolor in their realization of a complicated world. Woo approaches our current moment unafraid to play with the mess. Poem after poem delivers sparks of unexpected images, sizzling line breaks, and flashes of a world that remains vivid and alive. Across the varied landscape of poems, we encounter an “inner landscape full / of white space and cows,” “a hand of silk / selling us the pixelated remains / of elephants in a museum” geese that “honk like all hell, / stretching an alarm across the sky.” In these moments, we see the animal and industrial worlds entwined, reflecting our human position within the wider ecology of the natural and constructed landscapes that we inhabit.
Still, Woo makes space for grief, rage, exasperation, and rawness in addition to celebration. She identifies aspects of the unraveling with an unflinching frankness. These sentiments strike hardest when Woo expresses the disconnect between the mental and physical worlds of the speaker. In a moment of quiet reflection, she admits how “it's easy to forget / I have a body / that needs me.” In a more exasperated mode, she writes “I stick a fork / -in-the-road into my socket / of my humming—sizzling brain.” When the grief becomes too much, the poems return to appreciation for what remains. Near the end of the collection, Woo asserts “there’s always time / to praise / the living world.” As the text alternates between buoyant celebration and shattering devastation, it both creates a tension that adds momentum to the collection and extends a point of connection to the reader. I recognized my own emotional oscillations between hope and despair mirrored on the page in moments such as this:
"The looking glass celebrates / as often as it mourns— / blue footed booby, / black rhino, Javan tiger. / I still only know how to change / one thing at a time, sitting outside, / rocking. Imagine: sending / tendrils down to the molten / core of the planet / like an anchor.”
As rich, dazzling, and tangible as the imagery is throughout I’d Rather Be Lightning, the collection shines most through its variety and playfulness in form. The topography of the collection is ensnaring. Poems provide space, leap into staccato, and densely stack lines together when each mode is necessary. Some poems spill into, across, and over the page, dotting up the white space and creating pockets of verse to leap between. One of the standout forms is a double erasure self-redacted poem in which the words of one poem align with the blacked out spaces of the other. This creates three distinct poems: “End of the Holocene (REDACTED),” “End of the Holocene (REDACTION), and the hidden poem that lives in the gap between them, visible if the reader holds the book just so and flips in between the poems to stitch them together. There is also the named “Bird Search (Extinct)” poem (and companion poem, “Bird Search (Extinct—Answers)”) that takes the form of a word search. While playful, Woo avoids gimmick through the careful consideration of her subject. By concealing extinct birds on the page, then laying out their names in a subsequent poem, she evokes a yearning—the complicated sensation of searching when we don’t even know what we are looking for—and then creates space for us to name, to admire, to mourn what has been lost. The inventive forms provide a dash of intrigue that resonate with meaning and enhance the text. The searching that occurs within the word search poem evokes the sense of yearning that lies at the heart of this collection: for a way through, a way out, a way within this tangled up world. Searching for lessons, reprieve, embodiment, and if not answers or solutions, then at least for the space to hold the absurdity (both beautiful and painful) of being part of a seismically shifting landscape.
Woo offers us poems that do not dilute the magnitude of the climate crisis, nor delude us into denying the dangers of this world. But the playfulness, experimentation, bombastic images, bold declarations, and intimate confessions all serve to form a collection that does not give in to despair. The final poems of the collection arc towards, if not salvation, then a dual acceptance and resistance to the end times (as named in the penultimate poem “End of World Postponed”). The final line of the collection echoes this duality and the complications found across the book: “…devour it all and begin again.” In these final words we find an ending, a beginning. I’d Rather Be Lightning offers a testimony and suggests a way of being that pulls us close to the world as Woo continues in the final poem, “I wait. Indulge in small rituals of plenty.” Through these offerings, Woo invites us to walk, to grieve, and to dance with her as we navigate uncertain times.
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Dancing in the End Times: Playfulness and Yearning in Nancy Lynée Woo’s I’d Rather Be Lightning
POETRY REVIEW
Image by Robert Collins from Unsplash
©2023 West Trade Review
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