Dear Alexandra van de Kamp,
In Mrs. Dalloway, the character Septimus Warren declares, “Beauty, the world seemed to say.” He goes on to list the countless, mundane things that suggest grand beauty to him: houses, railings, swallows in the sky; before simply concluding that, “…all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now.” I had a similar sweeping, yet intimate realization as I read your book, Ricochet Script.
In our current moment of disinformation and disillusionment, it is so refreshing to read poems that affirm the existence of beauty alongside the banalities and viciousness of our lives. These poems confront illness, existential dread and trips to the grocery store with an equal amount of care and probing wonder, stretching our cynical preconceptions of the world until they burst in stunning poetics. Each of your poems is visually arresting, like the great 20th century films you reference throughout the book. In “Noon,” you write, “the afternoon sky emulsifies / into midnight and pink peonies pop / the darkness like glow-in-the-dark toys.” The poems don’t reach for lofty conclusions about humanity, and instead allow the reader to settle into them naturally by revealing “the simplest of facts sometimes / radiating: This is your life.” These small tokens are curated and kept lovingly in these poems. Everything from dusty hat boxes to ovarian surgeries are portrayed in such lush, pulsing details that reading these poems becomes a cinematic experience.
Like any great movie, you blend humor and drama into work that lulls us before delivering a shocking kick. The poem, “If I Were the Writer of My Own Spy Thriller” takes the tropes of every James Bond movie and inverts them hilariously as the speaker asks for “No death-defying showdowns… unless they take place / in a city with well-funded art museums / and free admission for the public on Sundays.” Ahh… If only! The movie you describe flirts between fantasy and reality, flipping the violent tropes of a typical spy thriller into explorations of personal desire and reckoning. You describe a spy who pulls muscles while scaling walls, who second guesses herself, and who actually bleeds when shot: “the terrible, jarring bullet / interrogating her heart each time.” It is this final line that sends chills down my own fallible body.
Which brings me to another thing I find absolutely thrilling about this book: its insistence on portraying the human body as breakable and beautiful at once (or perhaps, beautiful in its fragility). So often, we see physical pain depicted in extremes. It is either grotesquely rendered to evoke pity and horror, or it is painted over in a glossy, romantic sheen that obscures the harshness of our hurt. What I admire most about poems like “Elegy to My Uterus with A Glass of Pinot Noir” and “A Thursday Morning List of My Fears” is that the metaphors and imagery illuminate the contours of bodily ailment, rather than cover them up. In “Elegy to My Uterus with A Glass of Pinot Noir,” the first stanza opens with a haunting image: “When they told me you had to go, / I envisioned myself on a train in a 1950s / European war film, staring out / at a country I’d never see again.” Before I can think about luxuriating in the cinematic metaphor, the second stanza quickly cuts to visceral reality: “Thick thud of an organ; swollen / thumbprint pressed against / colon, bladder…” While I am still reeling from the poem’s honest expression of loss, the subsequent graphic image of the organs makes me confront the limitations inherent in our bodies, in my body. We are made human by these limitations, and they come to define everything about our experience– including time.
What do we do with our lives when at any moment the architecture holding us upright could collapse? When our bones can break and our organs can shudder to a halt, what should we spend our precious time on? These poems do not offer a definitive answer, but they do give us a chance to explore the delicious possibilities. In “You Know It’s Been A Long Day,” the speaker meditates on the missed chances in life before settling on a childish thought about how plates of food “stare back at us trying not to pass judgment.” These kinds of thoughts “keep / the five-year-old alive in me despite / the mounting evidence that a life / can build its tragedies in mindful, / unstoppable degrees.” I love the juxtaposition here between the constraints of the physical world and the boundlessness of our own minds. If our bodies may ache, if our world may shut down, if our politicians may fail, why not focus on the small ways we can assert agency over our lives? You end the poem by considering what would happen if we abandoned our shopping lists and moved through grocery stores “by our wits,” happening upon the foods that bring us joy– “astounded at our sheer luck.” And that’s what I am most starved for these days: astonishment at our luck. I want an affirmation that in the midst of a pandemic, state violence, personal strife and the ever-present existential dread, we might still find ways to bask in the sheer luck of being alive. I want to be astounded at what it took for me to be here, in a bed which I have proudly made for the first time in a few days with a mug of tea someone I love has brewed for me, reading such honest poetry. I am so thankful to have spent time with your poems, Ms. van de Kamp. They have reminded me of the beautiful truth.
Thank you,
Vahni Kurra
Ricochet Script is an upcoming book from Next Page Press, available on April 1, 2022. Pre-order is available now. The poem “Sleep: A Report,” which is featured in the book, was originally published in Sweet. Click here to read the poem by Alexandra van de Kamp.
