“May the forces of evil get confused on the way to your house.” – George Carlin
Hold Your Own wastes no time. From the imperative affirmation of its title, to the George Carlin epigraph and the opening poem How to Write a War Poem, Wallschlaeger outlines the state of affairs. It’s one in which feelings of helplessness, fury and desperation are as homeostatic as war, racial inequality and violent sexism. She’s clear, these “forces of evil” are fixtures in our world. But, the potent assertion being made is, so are we. We are not going anywhere.
We can shrink from the inarguable truths of hegemonic masculinity, sexual miseducation, mental illness, and yes, our own inevitable funeral, but this poetry chooses to embrace them, to ready itself and face them head on. After listing materials in How to Prepare for Your Own Funeral, the procedure outlined then abruptly subverts the poem’s premise. This volta is unexpected and powerful, invoking to contemplate not just on their conceptualization of their dying, but on their living too.
If the first section of this collection is about the inequitable structures that our society is held within – and that threaten to destabilize us – the second is about holding these broken cisterns accountable. The poem Nothing, epitomizes this as Wallschlager names the negligent and culminates in the damning declaration, “The United States is a whole lot of nothing.”
Other bangers include American Happiness, On Seeing an Ad for Levi’s “Still I Rise” Tees for Black History Month and Letters to a Young Black Conservative and Young White Feminist respectively. The power of these poems can be exemplified in the closing line of How to Survive Confusion: “Confusion is America’s mode of time. Clarity is dangerous, and political.” This is poetry that wields lucidity as a tool of resistance.
The penultimate section shifts from its societal focus to a relational one, before the last section lands in a seamless amalgamation of both. The narrator summons from some unknown reserve, the capacity to hold others. She holds space for the brokenhearted looking for answers in their origins, the exploited horse, determined seeds of corn, the ones that call her Mommy. But most pertinently, she holds space for her own inner child, retrogressing through time and redressing wrongs she couldn’t wholly recognize at the time, from violin lessons to late-night bartending shifts.
“For I declare on this afternoon / it is my sacred right to be loved / gently & serenely, yes I said it / I’m asking for it right now / on my knees in the failing city.” From Manifesto.
In the closing poems Manifesto, This is a Grace Period and What I Want, the poet typifies the heart-cry of this collection. Within these poems, is a final holding. A stability, reinstituted by grounding beatitudes. In these last stanzas, the poet gifts us meditative reminders that accountability, resistance, empathy, grace and peace, can coexist together. We can, and must, hold them all on our own.
Book Review written by F.M Papaz with thanks to Copper Canyon Press for providing a Reader Copy.
Writer Bio
F.M Papaz is a Greek-Australian creative and writer who believes that there is space at the literary table for everyone and is excitedly setting up your cutlery. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Wild Roof Journal, Five South & Mantissa Poetry Review amongst others. She does Editorial work for Milk Press and Tabula Rasa Review as well as being a Marketing Associate for PSNY. Connect @fmpapaz on Instagram & TikTok and visit fmpapaz.com/ings to find her monthly newsletter about living a creative life and to find her chapbook, ‘Distance Makes the Heart Grow.’