Book Review: Staying Alive by Laura Sims

Staying Alive
Poems by Laura Sims
Ugly Duckling Presse, March 2016
ISBN-13: 978-1937027629
$14.00; 77 pp.
Reviewed by Trista Edwards

In Laura Sims’s fourth collection, Staying Alive, the world has ended. The apocalypse finds itself settling down upon the earth, and humanity muddles through what remains. What remains, the speaker suggests in the book’s opening lines, stands to be “The future / Empty / Of Children.”

Contemplating this infinite and childless world, we follow the speaker through three large sections of title-less poems, clipped lines, and urgent language:

The world

Burns best

When its soft mass, intact

Is lashed, pinned or woven to deepening whiteness

The darker

The night grooves the face of the world and

Clean snow stifles the cavity

The line structure mocks the world’s state of affairs. In seemingly erratic chaos, however, Sims’s lines are calculated and guiding. Only their appearance takes on disorder. In the darkness of destruction, the speaker lights what is left to see. We gather that the end of world as we know it was not entirely caused by humanity’s hand but rather something otherworldly, cosmic. The speaker details “the rose-colored foot / Of the Martian / [that] Fell  / like a / garment […].” A little further on, the speaker admits:

I became

One of them, leaning over the railing

And no one would help

The humans left

Not even the humans

As to who “them” are is open to speculation. Pop culture has taught the masses that in apocalyptic situations the fear often comes not from invading forces but from humanity itself—what it turns into, what humans do in times of distress, what measures they take to stay alive. Here, the speaker “becomes” one of them; them leaning over the railing from a vantage point and looking down on the humans that no one would help. From this view the speaker sees how quickly humanity abandons itself and becomes something seemingly less human, less empathetic. Whether this speaker truly morphs or ascends into another being or just rapidly adapts to a harsher, more violent world devoid of compassion, they note how quickly forgotten the trappings of comfort become—“In puddles and mud / In mittens and coats / Lies my tribe”—when survival is the primary concern.

Staying Alive, the collection and the act, is not just about destruction. In these poems is an inherent renewal and the dawn of a new life. The sentiment for rebirth is eminent. The second section opens with hope and possibility:

COLOSSAL           FIGURES          OBSCURED BY MIST

“The world can’t possibly fail”

The world can’t fail but it will change. There is fear in change, but there is also relief. As new worlds are built, humanity sheds what came before:

When the culture passed over

We bathed       in its light        in its fear         in its

Mountain stream. We left mountains

Of carts full of junk behind. We bade them

Farewell. They bade us

Weep and know shame

They bade us be hard.

Without power, I wielded my body

Again, hints of the material, such as the aforementioned mittens and coats, are left behind. The carts full of junk will not be the saving grace they once were. They are no longer the indicators of success or consolation but liabilities to humanity’s new existence. Here, the speaker trades one kind of power for another—the power of electricity, of technology, for the power of the autonomous body. The body is the new vehicle for progress, or rather it returns to its original role: the hard, physical life it once steered. It may be, as the collection suggests, the only and “final machine.”

In the collection’s final section, the speaker’s world is one of adaptation and a reflection of how soon everything falls away to become stories of the past. New cities build on old, and life, in its emerging form, takes over. What or who is left thrives and old pain falls away. The speaker surfaces in this fresh world and asserts strength:

It feels good. That we are at home with the

Red & white stars

Her genes & mine

I squint and the city revives. I am suddenly

Bustling. Basket in hand. Among others

There is, quite literally, a grip that takes hold. Purpose arises. People become, as Sims writes, “fuel / for falling.” Beings “swell / then subside.” The world can’t fail, as the collection proclaims, but it can evolve, with or without humanity. Pieces of humankind will continue, as it always has, if only in the most miniscule form. The speaker rounds off the collection with a powerful consideration, “Those are my molecules, stopping the tides.” Life persists even if it is only the continuation of our molecules in the body of a new instrument: tide, sun, wolf, smoke. Humanity will continue to be part of creation—“We who don’t live / On this earth”—we just have to accept it won’t be human in form. That, that, is staying alive.

Trista Edwards is a Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of North Texas. Her poems and reviews are published or forthcoming in The Journal, Mid-American Review, 32 Poems, American Literary Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Rumpus, Sou’wester, Moon City Review, and more. You can follow her at her blog, marvelandmoon.com