What Will Keep Us Alive by Kristin LaTour
Sundress Publications, 2015
Kristin LaTour’s What Will Keep Us Alive explores intimacy and vulnerability alongside the simple plainness and patterns of domestic life. Opening with “Agoraphobia,” the collection sends us away from crowded spaces and into the quiet places where “there can be no fear.” This poem urges us to look and listen more closely, since “even the electric bees / tingle with symphonies.” As readers, we take this advice and dive in to a familiar world destabilized.
In “Eve Chooses her Fruit,” we meet the Serpent who wears an apron, nodding approval at Eve as she tests each of the fruits as if she were preparing to cook or bake. Eventually, “she takes it / in her small, dirty hands” and the Serpent nods in approval “as her eyes roll back, her tongue / licks the juice from her lips.”
The small details point us toward a kitchen setting. In fact, recipes come up several times throughout this collection. Part II begins with “Recipe for a Star,” which reads like a spell: “Your whisper must include words / like polyphony and panoply, zenith and azimuth” and “Let the sparkle fall from your fingers.” Of course, we’re still grounded with images like a door hung ajar and oak trees. These poems in the forms of recipes and advice force us to reconsider our expectations for these conceived forms. What magic can be uncovered?
So many of the themes and images of What Will Keep Us Alive are encompassed within the piece “The Human Cannonball Recalls His Boyhood.” This poem is rife with sensory images like the “explosive scents like paprika and sweat” and “he grew afraid of matches and the cook stove fire.” One of the most endearing lines comes closer to the end, in which the young Human Cannonball “taught his sister to sew sheets to catch him, his brother to safely light fuses.” Here, LaTour brings an unaccredited photograph to life. We’re given an oddly sweet family portrait we may never have imagined otherwise.
Fire ties this collection together. Poems like “Her Knack for Flicking Matches” and “On the Days She Becomes a Bee” burn and flame, reminding us how all can go up in smoke at any moment, though there’s beauty to be found in that danger: “The window frames a meadow of milkweed. butterflies. Tonight it will flicker firefly.” Like these two, many of the poems are written in third person, describing a “she.” The pronouns can become distracting, yet they achieve the effect of playing with the readers’ preconceived notions of self and storytelling. Without the “I,” we’re forced to consider the speaker as storyteller, and therefore encounter a strange combination of intimacy and distance.
This book is a recipe for the juxtapositions that keep us alive: history and fable, falling into the norm while simultaneously disrupting it, casting spells as well as prayers. What Will Keep Us Alive is nourishment.
Stacey Balkun is the author of Jackalope-Girl Learns to Speak (dancing girl, 2016) and Lost City Museum (ELJ, 2016). A Finalist for the 2016 Event Horizon Science Poetry Competition as well as the Center for Women Writer’s 2016 Rita Dove Award, her work has appeared in Gargoyle, Muzzle, THRUSH, Bayou, and others. A 2015 Hambidge Fellow, Stacey served as Artist-in-Residence at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2013. She holds an MFA from Fresno State and teaches poetry online at The Poetry Barn.