Review: Pine by Amie Whittemore

Pine
by Julia Koets
Southern Indiana Review Press, April 2021

$16.95, 72pp
ISBN: 978-1-930508-49-1

Review by: Amie Whittemore

          Like desire, coming out is more process than moment; desire, the private underbed girding coming out, the siren whistling in every queer ear, come here, come here. Like desire, coming out is never simple, not a flare gun sparking once and finished. Desire doesn’t require the public act of coming out to exist; it permeates and radiates through experience, making a galaxy of a closet. It is the power of queer desire to deviate and to persist that Julia Koets’s Pine celebrates and mourns. Why must this love be secret, Pine asks, and why must this secret be so painful and delicious? 

          Pine is divided into two sections, “Potentiality” and “Ephemera,” both speaking to the fleetness of desire, to the ways in which queer stories often exist in liminal spaces, often remembered and carried through oral histories, through pop culture, through means that often erode or escape more permanent forms of record-keeping. Thus, the poems rely on a suite of images that demonstrate both the potential energy and ephemeral nature embedded in queer experience: wind, moon, break(ing), breath, water, silence (through the absence of hearing) permeate the first section’s examination of the crossroads of fear and desire.  As expressed in “Eros as Oxygen Mask,” 

           Fear of certain kinds of desire

can manifest in the body like hypoxia.

          A tendency to ignore our feelings

or act on them only in secret—both a kind

          of flight—can result in what a pilot feels

under rapid decompression. Arterial 

          constriction, neurologic shock. 

           Here, desire is both the breath and the threat to breath; later, the speaker asks, “Could we pass this paper bag—a kind of kiss— / back & forth between us?” wondering if this desire can mitigate the very threat it represents. 

          No easy answer presents itself, so of the many repeated forms Koets employs (villanelles, “Eros as” poems, solstice/equinox poems, etc.), elegies embroider the first part of the collection. In “Beach Town Elegy,” the speaker mourns her inability to leave the oppressive American South: “If I try to dig to China, anywhere / but where I grew up, water fills the space, // follows me the more I leave.” In “Daughter Elegy,” the speaker imagines her and her lover’s daughter, though her lover claims it’s “impossible.” The speaker nonetheless envisions how, “One night I’d tell her / how I helped you dye your hair / one summer,” the beloved’s hair turning “the shade of harvest moon.” Here desire’s potentiality and limitations coexist, inseparable and overlapping. 

           Many of the poems in “Potentiality” repeat the idea of not being heard and how one’s voice becomes a stand-in for coming out: our voices call us out. In the second poem, “The Breakers,” Koets establishes this motif: “past the breakers, no one on the beach / can hear us,” building on it in “The Boathouse”: 

I try to tell him what I can’t easily

              tell him, what seems impossible in the South: 

I love a girl. Saying the words, a feat 

 in itself.

            Silence in these two moments reveals its dual edge: at once protective of privacy, as in “The Breakers,” as well as oppressive: speaking of desire is a shedding of safety. 

          However, the oppressive nature of silence exists between the lovers as well. Their closeted love threatened by secrecy as much as it had been fed by it. For instance, in “Field Notes on Loving a Girl in Secret,” “we drive / back roads, the only place we speak openly,” and later in “Eros as Bus,” “She doesn’t want anyone hearing // she’s anything but straight,” is indicative of internalized homophobia and the weight the speaker struggles under as she navigates her desire. 

          In the first section, Koets offers multiple definitions of “pine,” its definitions suggesting both loss and desire: “to want without seeing… to wilt with loss… to suffer grief.” Section two opens with a companion poem offering multiple definitions of the word “shed”: “to spill… a hiding place… to resist being affected by… to put out a fire.” Throughout Pine, Koets defines queer desire and experience on her own terms. In the second half we see a shedding of what the closet kept hidden and what happens outside of it. I love the poems to Sally Ride and Jodie Foster, poems that speak to the intersections of pop and queer culture, as well as of solidarity with these two women who lived so long in the closet. In “A Villanelle for Jodie Foster,” the speaker addresses Foster directly: 

When you come out at the Golden Globes,

your silver dress glittering, all the stars aglow

            in the audience, you speak about privacy,

but also wish, in your own brave voice, a radio

          wave, to be not so very lonely on this globe. 

        Pine speaks to the liminality of the closet, that space of readiness and unreadiness, the way they are two tides within the queer body and within which the queer body must coast, glide, thrash, and marvel. 

        Desire, like coming out, is a photon, wave and particle at once—a moment and a series of moments, an action and a series of actions. A doing and an undoing. A chapter closing as one opens. This circular motion is the shape we trace onto our lover’s back; or as Koets puts it, in “Eros as Asteroid”: “I make the following observations of Eros: / bruises, the marks your fingers left on my thighs, / look like the sky at the end of night.” In other words, we pine and shed, in complex, myriad ways. We wear our wounds—the ones formed by desire as well as those formed by the prejudices surrounding that desire. 

Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.