Review: Jill Mceldowney
On Otherlight by Jill Mceldowney
by Tyler Truman Julian
From the opening line of Jill Mceldowney’s full-length debut, Otherlight grips the reader with an emotional and ontological intensity that leaves them gasping for air. While difficult to read for its subject matter, especially in one sitting, the collection is best read as a whole. Reeling through the grief and survivor’s guilt of a boyfriend’s death by overdose, the speaker takes the reader through the deep-water of depression and the heady, torturous heights of attempting to make sense of untimely loss. Taken in its entirety, the collection becomes a devastating love story and reflection on mortality and, across the poems, the reader experiences every emotion of the speaker, eventually understanding (as much as they can without actually living it) that opening line: “I know it scares you when I say I’m not afraid to die” (“The Lake Will Wait”).
Otherlight poses questions about life and death that rarely, if ever, get answered. But how does one make sense of unexpected loss? This question is one both the reader and speaker of the collection must wrestle with throughout Otherlight, and while that could seem to be a logical goal for Otherlight’s speaker, she doesn’t want to make sense of the loss. Instead, she points the reader to the carnal and emotional reaction one has when confronted with questions of the hereafter and the reality of grief:
when will you stop believing me when I say I’m getting better
about taking my meds,
when I say I stopped thinking of jumping a long time ago?
I disappoint you. When I talk about the comforting gloom
of a birdless sky, that lake
of quiet, I hear my own shadow
call it want. Call it impossible—
to heal, to understand,
to shake a ghost bird back to life in its cage, impossible to build
cages under every bridge I’ll ever cross—you can’t
make someone want to be alive no matter how hard you shake them.
(“The Lake Will Wait”)
The speaker not only creates questions for the reader but is bombarded herself with external questions in her lover’s absence. Her own: When will you believe me? Why did he die this way? Where is he now? Will we meet again? And those of others, specifically, therapists, who appear throughout the collection. Attempting to answer these questions may seem a type of healing to those unacquainted with grief, but to do so would separate the lover from the speaker in her mind. When she is able to mull over questions of God and disaster, he appears. If she gets closure, he’ll disappear. In the first of a series of poems that mirror the conversations between a therapist and the speaker, when the therapist asks why the speaker has made the appointment, the speaker fleshes out this dynamic, responding,
As if I could explain that easily
when there are places on this earth that grow so wild
even our maker was not sure where to begin.
And how could I hope
to begin knowing
what it will cost me to say what I really mean?
When you see me in so much pain I am unable to speak
will you call me ice?
Will you rip my life wide open? (“Psychotherapy: Prologue”)
The speaker may not fear dying, but she fears losing the grounding that grief brings, as irrational as that may seem to those unaffected by loss. However, revealing too much or probing too deeply into this trauma will cause the speaker to lose control of what she does have control of, her grief. The questions—implied, rhetorical, and sincere—in Otherlight root the reader in the speaker’s story and give important context to her emotional state and the specific loss she has experienced. “Everyone has their own overdose story to draw from,” the speaker declares in “Psychopharmacology: Half Life,” and the questions she asks, and the images used to illustrate them, offer the reader a foothold to connect with the specific grief of the speaker.
Through the collection, Mceldowney crafts a powerful narrative. Each of the poems propel the reader forward and deeper into the speaker’s story, linking what came before and what is yet to come. In this way, Mceldowney deftly helps her reader see connections not only between the work and their life, but between individual moments in the work itself. As the therapy series continues, the speaker maintains her exploration of loss and the fear that it has inserted into her life. If she moves on, looks to the future, there is now only uncertainty. In “Psychopharmacology: Levels,” the speaker furthers this idea,
The worst part of loss is that you live
after it and my life
has been annihilated by this loss.
I miss him and I have been
missing him and
I am allowed to be afraid that I will never be the same.
The speaker makes sure the reader understands everything that was lost in her lover’s death. She saw a future, albeit gilded, with him:
It was clean.
It was impossible, angels
lit by polar auroras. I’ll never get over it.
He kissed my hair to wake me, my face
against his shoulder.
I felt the heel of a child in the small of my back.
I’m allowed to be angry.
Look at what’s been lost. (“Psychotherapy: Epilogue”)
The speaker’s loss is cemented here in some ways because the relationship has now moved beyond young, although passionate, love to something larger. Moreover, presenting this moment at the end of the collection, at the end of the therapy series, gives the reader a significant and well-earned payoff. Mceldowney’s narrative skill is on display here and throughout the collection.
Otherlight gives the reader ample opportunity to both commiserate at a distance and experience (almost) first-hand the speaker’s grief. The framing is almost cinematic as Mceldowney zooms in and out on her subject. This is a masterful approach to the challenging subject matter of the collection. As the speaker continues to explore the question of moving on from loss, it becomes clear that she cannot. Instead, she walks the reader through what it feels like to try to move on in a modern, structurally complex spin on the confessional poem:
Every new man tastes like your name.
I would do anything
to keep him—anything—
is not enough to keep him alive. I listen
to the horse beats of his heart rush him further.
Loss
like your’s—again, can I take it? (“History of Sleep”)
The speaker’s fear of unexpected loss is reasonable. The guilt that compounds that fear though is tragic. Mceldowney illuminates this reality with ease as her speaker oscillates between both guilt and fear believably. “Overall, how would you describe your mood?” the therapist asks in “Psychotherapy: Epilogue.” The speaker takes this opportunity to finally say it plainly, “I feel guilty / that I am alive // when he is not. I am guilty // all of the awful things that I have done to stay alive.” This form of magical thinking is going to be familiar to anyone who has experienced grief, but also adds a sad literary irony to the text because the reader knows there’s nothing the speaker could have done to prevent her boyfriend’s death.
Otherlight is both otherworldly and fixed squarely in the human experience. The tragic-beautiful story Mceldowney crafts across the poems of this collection is an expert display of the poet’s attention to audience and technique. She skillfully makes sure the poems remain in conversation with one another and build off one another as the reader moves through the collection. This keeps the reader necessarily grounded while Mceldowney probes deeply into the emotions of loss. The work’s questions about life after loss, posed by a troubled, relatable speaker, brush against the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell as she sits with grief, and ultimately, Mceldowney is brave enough to write out what many readers who have experienced loss would like to say to God, others, and ultimately, themselves. Otherlight is essential reading for both those who are and aren’t afraid to die.