Book Review: Backcountry by Sarah Marcus

Backcountry
Poems by Sarah Marcus
Finishing Line Press, 2013
ISBN-13: 978-1622293087
$14.00; 32pp.
Reviewed by Alyse Bensel

In Backcountry, a series of brief yet compelling narratives, Sarah Marcus charts the rise and fall of the relationship between two lovers by mapping the territories of loss, loneliness, and inner strength. These poems, hovering on the brink of disaster between neglect and drug abuse, seethe with tension with only a few, quick details. “Harbor Lights” documents the moments between the two lovers attending rehab and meetings, and yet the sky, “the color of melon or something blander, turns yellow // and unsafe. Feels like a tornado’s coming, he says.” This unease is felt earlier, where the relatively benign action of drinking coffee is set up as addiction in “Register.” By the poem’s end, “She dreams that her veins collapse. Knows he’s / hard to reach due to peripheral venous scarring.”

This succinct yet vivid imagery haunts the remainder of the collection, even when it ventures outdoors. In long couplets, the title poem excels in constructing this fraught relationship, where the lovers argue about exploring the backcountry. “Throw me in, she says, and leave me there,” yet he refuses to follow her into the wilderness. But she implores, through the language of natural cycles, about how animals die in geysers, “killed by the heat that they thought would save them.” An inevitable destruction persists and is even acknowledged through continuing this complicated need.

Even in the chapbook form’s small breadth, Backcountry still provides sharp glimpses into the ability to recover while acknowledging its cyclical and varied path filled with illusion and hardship.

Alyse Bensel is the author of two chapbooks, Not of Their Own Making (Dancing Girl Press, 2014) and Shift (Plan B Press, 2012). Her poetry has recently appeared in Mid-American Review, Heavy Feather Review, and Ruminate, among others. She serves as the Book Review Editor at The Los Angeles Review and Co-Editor of Beecher’s, and is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Kansas.