1 essay by Shou Jie Eng,
on the poems of Alison Swan

Twins

There is so much that is doubled in these poems. There is so much that is doubled in
these poems. A short while ago, I encountered a photograph of a friend with her twin. I knew that she had a sister, but not that her sister was her twin. The shock of confusion: which of the two was the person I knew? In a sense, both and neither at the same time. Likewise, I do not know the “woman who helped raise me” who figures so strongly in these poems, but I recognise parts of her in “others’ lives,” especially when they become so numerous that, seen together, these others become “America.” Or am I mistaken? Such is the nature of the shock created by doubling: almost certainly I know less of the lives of others, more about the speaker’s mother, and more and less about both, than I think do.

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Organs

A problem of definition. Where are the edges of our bodily organs, and how are they to
be distinguished from each other and from the body as a whole? In ‘Carrying’, the
speaker notes, by means of a clever syntactical inversion, how they were once interior to their mother. “My mother inside whose skin I once nestled / with her heart and lungs and stomach,” the poet writes, sounding out the very problem of definition via the enjambment. The personhood, the “I-ness” of the speaker, is enclosed by a mother’s skin and located alongside the mother’s organs; the separation of the enjambment, as thin as uterine walls stretched by pregnancy, highlights how transparent the boundaries between inside/out and self/other really are.

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Flora

A heart might be a parsnip, or a rutabaga, or a turnip. The efflorescence at the tips of
goldenrods might be the flames of torches. These figures become charged by their
doubling, their boundaries permeable. The poems are shrouded in a great deal of
darkness, but I find myself excited by these metaphoric leaps and the possibilities that
they create. In Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharpe asks and answers, “What is beauty
made of? Attentiveness whenever possible to a kind of aesthetic that escaped violence
whenever possible—even if it is only the perfect arrangement of pins.”    Surrounded by “sleep so deep it seemed like death,” it is the poet’s attention to the possibilities of
metaphoric thinking that points to a way out.

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Return

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But is there a way out? There is a deep sense of indictment running through these
poems. Indictment of humans, who turn “freshwater bodies” into “churches and church lawns / and church parking lots,” who crush “the exoskeletons of insects…again and again and again,” and who “sleep through others’ lives,” only later “wondering if all that shut-eye was worth it.” By disregarding the ways that we are entwined with human and  nonhuman others and constantly seeking to enclose the wild and untameable, we have produced a masquerade—a hardening of life into images.

Doublings do not always indicate returns, and if they do, sometimes these returns are
spirals instead. The poems are doubtful about our ability to listen to the song of the
geese, whose year-round presence simultaneously points out and is caused by our
deafness to their warnings. The cost of this heedlessness is ultimately twofold. The first is the gradual loss of hope and imagination, to be replaced by bitterness. The second is summed up by the closing lines of the final poem, ‘For Everything There Is a Season’: “the cold frame, / then the long long wait.” One hopes that the wait will not be forever.

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1 Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 85.