When You’re Stuck in Traffic by Alecia Gabrielle
Bottlecap Press, 2023
Have you ever read a book of poems at 2 in the morning and become overwhelmed by a hybrid emotion you couldn’t quite articulate? This happened to me reading Alecia Gabrielle’s When You’re Stuck in Traffic (Bottlecap Press, 2023). Covered in my favorite blanket, drinking coffee at 2 a.m. while reading all 20 poems in Gabrielle’s chapbook, I sensed both joy and sadness roil within; I felt bereft but also hopeful. At that late/early hour, the word for this emotional concatenation eluded me; all I could do was let the tears brim but not overflow and vow to find the exact word to describe my bag of marbled emotions later.
From the start I realized Gabrielle, who previously self-published two books of poetry, knows exactly the emotional ride she’s sending us on. The collection’s first lines from “Not of This Earth” tell us how to engage with her work:
If you ever tried
to spin the world
in an opposite direction,
my words would make sense.
Already, there is a sense of movement (spinning); she’s telling us to buckle up while we know from the book’s title we’re about to be “stuck.” This establishes a theme she carries throughout the collection, the push and pull of unmet expectations: a “hindered path,” a journey where we “stop and wait in the fog . . . again.” Throughout the collection, there is a feeling of the persona being let down, of counting on something that doesn’t consistently hit the mark. Further in the first poem, she asserts, “Blame your father or blame/yourself—it is the same story.” If someone is to blame, some need has not been fulfilled. This constant push and pull feels like putting your foot on the gas and then braking, gas and brake. The persona should be/wants to be moving, but there is always something blocking progress, causing stasis. Indeed, in “Cruelty, Defined,” Gabrielle asserts: “if you tilt the hourglass / the flow of time stops in your hands.” The speaker is addressing herself here, acknowledging that even the self can be responsible for stifling its own progress. However, she completes the image with, “You can count the spots as they run through.” What she’s illustrating is not a complete stop; if one is determined enough, the hinderance is just an interruption.
Gabrielle uses the word time more than any other word in her chapbook, and references to calendars, days, months, seasons, years, are peppered throughout. Additionally, time and place together are important themes. In “Bloodlust,” she addresses both with the opening image of the “back porch creak[ing] as if/to hold enchanted moments.” The place (back porch) attempts to stop or slow down time by holding the moment. The speaker “linger[s],” the ground is “frozen,” and further, “[t]he buried hometown we budded from is a flatline,” implying time is motionless and the town itself is a place dreams are “interrupted.”
Throughout the collection, Gabrielle also juxtaposes these real places like the back porch and her hometown against fantasy lands and fairy tales (mermaids, castles, “couch fortresses,” and moats) as well as beaches, islands, and “fictitious hideaway[s],” all underscoring the theme of unmet expectation (fantasy) versus reality that can bring about disillusionment. Indeed, many lines and phrases begin with or contain a negation, the words not or no, such as, “do not wear,” “do not know,” “could not picture it,” “could not have imagined it,” “not painted,” “not bright enough,” “not to obey,” “no true north,” “did not satisfy,” “do not wait.” These phrases emphasize just how heartbreaking it can be to need something, to want something that never comes to fruition.
These themes evoked that feeling of sorrow in me. When Gabrielle says, “Blame your father or blame/yourself—it is the same story,” some emotion in me ruptured. Like the persona who is always looking for signs, for direction (“I would have asked for more, / prayed for another neon exit sign”) I feel an underlying grief, not because I blame my father for anything but because I have experienced the loss of him; I, too, feel directionless. But tucked in with this feeling of being directionless are tidbits of hope. The poem “Deflated Rage” presents us with wishes made on eyelashes where “not a single one has ruled my youth” and where there is “no true north.” Yet the poem ends with two lines so filled with soft hope they were the impetus for my aforementioned tears: “The little wishes are unmemorable now, / so I’ll carry a compass and make new ones.” Despite each unfulfilled wish, each disappointment, the persona retains hope, determination, and carries that compass to find her own direction. I was left speechless by this short poem.
Bottlecap’s website states that When You’re Stuck in Traffic “lingers like strange afterthoughts even after the drive home ends.” I agree. Certainly after reading it, the joy/sadness I initially felt still haunted me days after. In the back of my mind, I knew a succinct word must exist to describe it. The word seemed more adjacent to versus akin to contronym—a word the exact opposite of itself (like cleave/cleave). After many search strings I finally lit on charmolypi, a Greek word that according to Hellenic Museum’s post on X refers to, “the joy that emerges out of the middle of sadness and (conversely) the sadness that merges out of joy: an integrated feeling that cannot exist without both sorrow and joy, dwelling together and giving rise to each other.”
That was precisely it! I had found the word for how I had been feeling for days. Perhaps Gabrielle did not have this exact word in mind as she composed When You’re Stuck in Traffic, but certainly the evocation of emotional turmoil is purposeful. All good poetry is evocative, and Gabrielle’s chapbook is worth the read. I encourage you to “take a bold breath” and go on this ride with her. Get stuck in traffic with her poems for a while. She’s going to challenge you and tell you, “[P]leas and cries and designs did not satisfy the artist inside,” but she also charges you to remember, “happiness must be divisible by patience and practice.” You’ll get there; she knows you will.
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Michelle McMillan-Holifield is a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. Her work has been included in or is forthcoming in Boxcar Poetry Review, Nelle, Sky Island Journal, Stirring, The Collagist, The Main Street Rag, Whale Road Review, and Windhover, among others. She hopes you one day find her poetry tacked to a tree somewhere in the Alaskan Wild.