Review: Kelli Russell Agodon
On Kelli Russell Agodon’s Dialogues with Rising Tides
by Tyler Truman Julian
Kelli Russell Agodon’s forthcoming poetry collection, Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), is connective tissue in a world that feels not just disjointed, but surgically separated. Agodon’s contemporary and down-to-earth poetry pulls a narrative from grief and melancholy that has personal repercussions for the reader and global impact for the community they re-enter upon closing the collection. Dialogues with Rising Tides is profoundly personal in the best possible way. The speaker in these lyrical, confessional poems is not only a mirror but a companion, guiding the reader to and through various revelatory experiences, that all seem to say, Don’t forget to put your mask on first and It’s okay to want something different.
“In the darkness it’s impossible / to see the darkness,” announces Agodon’s speaker. “How long must you know someone / until they see your scars?” she asks (“Wound Is A Form of Wind”). Deeply conversational, these poems broach taboo and create dialogue. Relatable, the speaker casually leads to profound depth. “As a child I believed suicide only happened / to the Hemingways” becomes the entry point into a harrowing yet candid poem exploring familial mental illness and its legacy (“To Have and Have Not”). In “I Don’t Own Anxiety, but I Borrow It Regularly,” Agodon pulls the personal into the universal or metaphysical and back without melodrama, rooting the poem and anxiety in relatable realty; she writes,
This is why some of us wake up
in the middle of the night looking for a saint—
and maybe your saint is a streetlight
or maybe the sea or maybe
it’s the moment you walk out the door
and exist in the darkness,
announce to the heavens that you’re still alive.
Each poem stands effectively on its own—poignantly sharing, bringing ideas and individuals smoothly together—but the collection builds quietly line upon line and image upon image into a complicated but necessary conversation on mental health, beauty, and strength. “I dream of the song where the pharmacist / doesn’t judge me for not being able to make it through / the day without some sort of pill,” from “Braided Between the Broken,” is tangibly connected to a series of lines seven pages later that make up part of “Everyone Is Acting as If We’re Not Temporary, and I Am Falling Apart in the Privacy of My Own Home”:
Once I remember my dad saying,
You are worth more than you think, as I always sold myself
at a discount, and I wish I didn’t, I wish I didn’t
say how much I hurt on social media
but sometimes I just want to believe I’m not alone
like how we’re all doing cartwheels on life’s grass
until someone lands in a sinkhole, until one of us
decides it’s late and the streetlights
are telling us it’s time to return back home.
And this moment feels inextricably tied to “Hold Still,” in which the speaker declares, “I’ve never been / interested in mishandling any life but my own.” This collection is stitched together line by line in beautiful and disquieting ways.
In Dialogues with Rising Tides, Kelli Russell Agodon has crafted poetry that is restorative and necessary, but like all successful surgery, there will be scars, there will be needed rest and recovery after you sit with this collection. These poems are significant and personal, and you will be moved by them. They could change your world. These poems ask us to listen to our bodies, listen to our souls, and take care of both, so that, like Agodon’s speaker in “We Could Go On Indefinitely Being Swept Off Our Feet,” we can “trust the thirst we feel is trying to tell us something.”
Dialogues with Rising Tides was published by Copper Canyon Press on April 21, 2021.