Review: Melissa Crowe
On Lo by Melissa Crowe
by Tyler Truman Julian
As we enter the new year with its accompanying books, now is a good time to reflect on the past year, revisit our "To Be Read" lists, consider why certain books made the list, and prioritize them before moving on to the next trend. It can feel tempting to rush onto the newest books, especially at this point in history when we have more access to the written word than ever before. Maybe in the new year, we should strive to read those books that truly excite us, rather than what’s hot off the press.
For me, this meant returning to Melissa Crowe’s Iowa Poetry Prize winning collection Lo, which was released in May 2023. When The Shore published Crowe’s poem, “America You’re Breaking” in Issue 7, I knew I needed to read the collection it lived in. The collection itself is expansive, even larger than “America You’re Breaking,” with its exploration of the political division of the United States. Lo spans a lifetime, starting in childhood, exploring themes of ruralness, violence, community, and differentiation, before pulling up in the speaker’s mid-life, marking that period of one’s life with both hope and realistic ennui.
The poetry of rural spaces is typically marked by an attention to nature, individualism, family, labor, politics, decay, and accessibility. These markers are most noticeable early in the collection as Crowe’s speaker explores her childhood and offers important background for the rest of the collection. In the collection’s opening poem, “The Self Says, I Am,” the speaker wants the reader to know several things about her before proceeding:
Say I’m clover and Queen Anne’s
lace, devil’s paintbrush and lupine.
I’m a yard of junked cars, each
with its corona of broken glass
and never-mowed grass. Dirt trail
to cattail. My heart this sudden
pond, this skipped stone. Say
I’m a girl in a sundress, perpetual
beginner in a cloud of bees
and blackflies and my heart a foraged
apple, still green.
As Crowe’s speaker looks back on childhood, she wants the reader to know there is hope and resilience there, a hallmark of rural life. This “girl in a sundress,” the “perpetual beginner” adapts and overcomes over and over throughout life and contains multitudes.
When the collection progresses and turns thematically to violence, the speaker also reflects on early love interests and queerness, juxtaposing the beautiful and painful to paint a similar picture of resilience. Several subsequent poems explore unrequited love and allusions to sexual violence and then Crowe’s speaker breaks down many of the life lessons she’s received by the time of her late-teens:
...I was sixteen when I learned my grandfather
could no longer tell me from my mother or that year from 1975--
Sandy he kept saying that bitch sat on the shed roof waving
a whiskey bottle and laughing while they buried my mother &
by bitch he meant my Gram from whom I’d learned men are hooks
I shouldn’t let into me & it’s okay to sleep alone without
drawers on under my nightdress. At seventeen I learned no house
is emptier than one you've begged to be left in while your father
takes your mother south again to have the cancer out hopefully
but definitely her uterus & whatever else they find eaten by the
stuff that made her bleed so much on the bed the mattress couldn't
be saved. Even with the dog in the yard I didn’t feel as brave as
I thought I would & though I could see my grandfather’s house
from the porch of my own I didn’t go there where I'd be called
by the wrong name. Instead I called you & you came as you always
did & as you still do--with a carton of Five Alive & a fistful
of daisies & you said Melissa, Melissa & I let you in. I let in
whatever that might bring & you touched me in ways that made me
forget—want to forget—every single other thing I'd ever learned. (“Lessons”)
In “Lessons” we see the impulse for differentiation. The speaker begins to separate from the family and become her own person to break the pattern of trauma. The speaker finds love, makes her own family, and confronts past trauma in her personal development outside of the family unit and the dysfunctional rural space. When the man who sexual assaulted her as a child is caught, for reasons unknown to the reader, she feels both relief and pain:
Thank god I thought, burning,
Somebody will ask me. Nobody asked me.
Thank god I thought, burning, knowing
for the first time maybe what he’d done to
me, that what he’d done to me was
wrong enough to go to jail for, if you told.
Nobody asked me. I understood they knew
Already. I understood they didn’t want to know
...
but to stay free don't we have to call a hole
a hole, a goddamn shed a shed? (“When She Speaks of the Fire”)
There’s a sharp maturity in this long poem that directs the rest of the collection and shifts the reader into the adulthood poems of the collection. The speaker must also recognize the limitations of family life and establish boundaries to continue to grow.
In “The Parting,” the speaker turns her gaze outward onto a husband, showing how her life has changed in adulthood. She has found, maintained, and cultivated love, and as a result, she is able to focus on the pain of others and support them, rather than her own, establishing further this sense of growth. The speaker relates,
Husband, I didn’t know the beautiful
broad-winged shape riding the air above us
as we lay in the hammock under the loblolly
pines was a buzzard until you told me.
Namer of whatever dark thing hovers,
you too deserve the truth, so when the police
find your father in a slick of blood
and offer no other explanation but natural causes,
I say he drank himself to death
This poem highlights the push-pull relationship of a couple who are comfortable with each other and who rely on each other to help make sense of the world. This relationship seems a far cry from the girl who was surrounded by family but was alone in the pain, violence, and self-discovery of her childhood.
Lo concludes by underscoring continual personal growth and highlighting the speaker's enduring love for family amidst a poignant past in “General Absolution.” The poem employs the shared communal symbol of 9/11 to delve into themes of forgiveness. With shrewd realism and accessible engagement with the subject, Crowe’s speaker explains that general absolution is a type of blanket forgiveness for sins in an emergency, then asks,
Will you know what I mean if I say
we should have designated all the water
holy? I’m trying to forgive you. And if you’re
wondering who you are, you’re everyone.
The forgiveness in “General Absolution” is imperfect. Yet, it is notable in its attempt and extension to everyone: the speaker’s mother, the man who assaulted her, the hijackers on 9/11, her husband, and even us, the readers, who have voyeuristically peered into this world unable to do anything about what we have seen. This human, imperfect resilience is the power of Lo by Melissa Crowe. The collection spans a lifetime, childhood to mid-life, leaving room for future growth and narrative discovery, but each moment in time is deftly and poignantly handled. There’s anger, fear, and sadness in these pages, but there’s also humor and beauty. In Lo, Crowe has created a deeply human work of art.