Review: The State She’s In by Lesley Wheeler

Reviewed by Cynthia Hogue

The State She’s In
by Lesley Wheeler
Tinderbox Editions, 2020
$18.00; 96 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-943981-17-5

Lesley Wheeler’s fifth collection of poetry, The State She’s In (Tinderbox Press, 2020), is redolent with wittily acerbic poems.  She is a mordant chronicler of the state of the Union these last four tumultuous years, from the Women’s March protesting the results of the 2016 election to the country’s first stunned steps toward a national reckoning with the legacies of white supremacy and slavery. Wheeler is an accomplished and inventive formalist poet.  An earlier work, a fantasy novel entitled The Receptionist, is in flawless terza rima.  The State She’s In transforms profound moral outrage at systemic sexism and racism into richly innovative and formally adventurous poetry.

Wheeler is bracingly direct about her location—Virginia, also Monacan land—and her subject position—“white, mother,” as she identifies herself in “Paid Advertisement.” She is blunt about what she can no longer abide: men who explain “Clinton’s failure” (“Imperfect Ten”); “mishear” her Title IX complaint (“Fifty-Fifty”); tell her she was hired for her looks, and prod her arm “with a hypodermic finger” under the table (“Journey”). In response, as she writes, wryly, “I was rude” (“Dear Anne Spencer”), and in the volume’s penultimate poem, “New Year Colonoscopy,” she empties herself “of last year’s toxic shit.”  Meanwhile, she’ll protest such an anti-immigrant candidate winning the presidential election by writing a ghazal, a form the poem identifies as “immigrant”: “Arab, Persian, Hindi, Pashto, Hebrew” (“Imperfect Ten”). She’ll pen a spell or two to banish sexist men (“All-Purpose Spell for Banishment”), moreover, and craft a “counter-screed” to neutralize racism (”Boil-in-a-Bag”).

This collection does its share to help uncover the racialized understory of dominant history in the U.S. For a number of the astute poems specific to Wheeler’s institution, for example, she dug into the archives of Washington and Lee University.  In doing so, she discovered that a donor’s bequest of slaves, who were sold to a Mississippi plantation, paid for the lovely “red brick buildings” and tree-lined paths of the present-day campus.  She “riffles through” the bills of sale of the slaves, their names the only evidence that they lived.  One, the eponymous John Robinson, apostrophizes (and cautions), “Ma’am, you do not know the first thing” (“John Robinson’s List, 1826,” emphasis Wheeler’s).  I usually find problematic such evocations of voice—specifically, as here, of someone whose life is so inaccessible to the poet—but the italicized speech interrupting the documentary passages in this poem are candid and moving.  In the end, surely because of her fierce ethos in such poems, I came to feel that Wheeler took steps to earn that imaginary access via the available poetic trope of apostrophe.

Wheeler is equally effective in detailing such major life passages as empty nest, menopause, and eldercare.  Her personal lyrics crackle with contrasts she puts into play and deftly balances.  Graphic descriptions of the “red excess” of perimenopause become revelatory trope for a female poet’s embodied relationship to her art: “the song carries / on, uncorkable pour of me, shameless” (“Perimenopause”). Nor does Wheeler shy away from what Alice Fulton has called the “inconvenient truths,” for instance the bitterness experienced by women whose lifelong ambitions have been frustrated. “I need to learn / how to endure my own / bitterness,” the speaker of “Black Walnut Tree” tells herself, even as she dryly observes that the tree is “strong and straight” because its poisons cleared the obstacles to reaching water.

Wheeler has of late had an interest in exploring the incantatory power of poetry, its connection to spells as well as its roots in song.  Throughout the volume are gem-like poems of conjure and spell, placed before or following more personal and political poems.  Such juxtapositions create tension and dialogue among poems with varying concerns.  A striking example are the first two poems, which establish this method.  The opening poem, “State Song,” is a performative invocation to heed a powerful “call.” Here’s the poem’s last stanza:

…………. . . . . . . . . Because I call you, power
…………thrums the ground. Now is the hour,
…………gilded, grand. I call this dazzle ours.
……………………(“State Song”)

We don’t know who or what is calling or being called, but we feel how the lines concentrate the occasion for the “call” in terza rima. These lines of measured folk meter gather the power of a conjuring presence who claims this “dazzle.”  But in whose name?

The next poem makes clear who owns this dazzle. Taking as its subject the historic Women’s March in January, 2017, the voice shifts to chronicle, planting its poetic feet on solid ground.  The driving force of “In the Pink” is the outrage that catalyzed women from all over the country to convene in protest and march in D.C., but Wheeler’s portrait is rooted in the lived experience of marching in winter. As much as the setting is full of high political drama, the poem unfolds with twists at once comic and hopeful. The speaker’s hip hurts. It’s freezing. The city is full of strong women with red noses in pink hats with “pointy ears”:

…………. . . . . . . .Countless cartoon uteri
…………lofted into polity: she, she, she.
…………Meanwhile, men orate.
…………This continues to be America.

The speaker has brought her daughter, however, and as dispirited as the mother might feel, nothing is lost on her daughter, whose “rebel yell” is “Gender isn’t real!” As she quips to her mother, “you can write the poem /. . .for my swearing-in.” (emphasis Wheeler’s).  

In this wonderfully varied and deeply felt collection, Wheeler is documenting America’s present, for the future.  She can take her place among the white feminist poets writing in order to protest and counter the ugly vestiges of misogyny and racism still evident today, and to participate in productive dialogue with such vital movements as Black Lives Matter. This is a major collection.

Cynthia Hogue has published nine poetry collections, including Revenance (2014) and In June the Labyrinth (2017), both from Red Hen. Revenance was listed as one of the 2014 “Standout” books by the Academy of American Poets. Her third book-length co-translation is Nicole Brossard’s Lointaines (forthcoming 2022), with Sylvain Gallais. Among her honors are two NEA Fellowships, a MacDowell Colony residency, and the Witter Bynner Translation Fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute. She lives in Tucson.