The Alcestis Machine: Poems

by Carolyn Oliver

Inspired by the Greek myth of Alcestis, this poetry collection brings to life myriad voices who venture beyond the known world and exist between realities.

In Greek mythology, Alcestis descends to the mysterious kingdom of death in her beloved’s place. In The Alcestis Machine, Carolyn Oliver’s second poetry collection, loss and queer desire echo across the multiverse. “In another life, I’m a . . .” sea witch or swineherd, vampire or troubadour, florist or fossil or museum guard, Oliver writes. These parallel personas inhabit space stations and medieval villages, excavate the Devonian seabed, and plumb a subterranean Anthropocene. In possible futures and imagined pasts, they might encounter “all wrong turns and broken signs” or carry “a suitcase full of stars.”

Oliver’s poems are animated by lush, unsettling verse and forms both traditional and experimental. The Alcestis Machine demonstrates how very present absence can be and how desire knows no boundaries. In neighborhood subdivisions or the vast reaches of space, it’s impossible to know “whose time is slipping / again.” Anyone “could come loose / from gravity’s shine.”

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

Published October 15, 2024

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carolyn is a blogger friend whose first collection, Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble, was on my Best Books of 2022 list. Her second is again characterized by precise vocabulary and crystalline imagery, often related to etymology, book history, or pigments (“You and I are marginalia shadowed / by a careless hand, we are gall-soaked vellum / invisible appetites consume.”). Astronomy and technology are a counterpoint, juxtaposing the ancient and the cutting-edge. I loved the language of sea creatures in “Strange Attractor” and the oblique approach to the passage of time (“Three popes ago, you and I”). The repeated three-word opening “In another life” gives a sense of many worlds, e.g., “In another life I’m a florist sometimes accused of inappropriate gravity.” Prose poems relay childhood memories. Love poems are tantalizing and utterly original: “If I promise not to describe the moon, will you / come with me a ways further into the night? / We’ll wash the forest floor / of ash and find a fairy ring / half-eaten, muted crescent bereft of power.” And alliteration never fails to win me over: “Tonight, snow tumbles over sophomores and starlings” and “the pillars in the water make a pillory not a pier”. Some of the collection remained cryptic for me; there was a bit less that grabbed me emotionally. But it’s still stirring work. And how flabbergasted was I to spot my name in the Acknowledgments?

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Eden Rayz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the poetry I want to read. Luscious prosody, fascinating world-building, with just the right amount of space for the reader to illustrate their minds eye’s interpretation without casting a shadow over what Oliver means. A great way to escape

[Violeta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Propelled by longing and set in a lush sonic landscape, the poems in The Alcestis Machine spin physics, magic, mythology, and art into an urgent universe of possibilities. I’m so impressed with Carolyn Oliver’s imagination and how great she is at pulling off formal challenges and building worlds in her work.

[Ann Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

The highly imaginative, often surreal, often magical, poems in this collection travel across space and time in ways that make sense to the internal logic of the work. Many begin “In another life, I am” …a voice for hire, a lamp-lighter, a sentry holding vigil over the Magna Carta…taking us on a delightful journey of Carolyn’s conjuring.