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Whiteout
When she was a toddler, Jessica Goodfellow’s twenty-two-year-old uncle, along with six other climbers from the 1967 Wilcox Expedition to Denali, was lost in an unprecedented ten-day storm blasting winds of up to three hundred miles per hour. Just as North America’s highest peak is so massive that it has its own distinct weather system—changeable and perilous, subject to sudden whiteout conditions—a family whose loved one is irretrievably lost has a grief so blinding and vast that it also creates its own capricious internal weather, one that lasts for generations. Whiteout is Goodfellow’s account of growing up in this unnavigable and often unspoken-of climate of bereavement.
Although her poems begin with a missing body, they are not an elegy. Instead, Goodfellow struggles with the absence of cultural ritual for the uncontainable loss of a beloved one whose body is never recovered and whose final story is unknowable. There is no solace here, no possible reconciliation. Instead, Whiteout is a defiant gaze into a storm that engulfs both the wildness of Alaska and of familial mourning.
Although her poems begin with a missing body, they are not an elegy. Instead, Goodfellow struggles with the absence of cultural ritual for the uncontainable loss of a beloved one whose body is never recovered and whose final story is unknowable. There is no solace here, no possible reconciliation. Instead, Whiteout is a defiant gaze into a storm that engulfs both the wildness of Alaska and of familial mourning.
- GenresPoetry
64 pages, Paperback
Published August 15, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 25, 2017
I've been following Goodfellow since her first collection, the chapbook A Pilgrim's Guide to Chaos in the Heartland, was released some years ago. (If you haven't read that, I recommend it!) I'm a fan. Goodfellow, who as a student was trained in mathematics, brings that same sort of precision to her poems. In Whiteout, she sets out to explore the story behind her uncle's disappearance on Denali. Too young when that happened to remember him much herself, she relies on her family's narrative of him. Their grief, though, has mostly rendered them silent: ". . .my grandfather almost stopped/ speaking the year after the accident. . . ."
Her uncle's body was never found. The poems in Whiteout are containers, for the mysteries of her uncle's death and for the way grief burrows into her family. Goodfellow's work is formally inventive: for example, the way some letters disappear from the page, literally "whited out." There is discovery in the words themselves, little riddles to be worked at. Whiteout is a compelling story, a must-read.
Her uncle's body was never found. The poems in Whiteout are containers, for the mysteries of her uncle's death and for the way grief burrows into her family. Goodfellow's work is formally inventive: for example, the way some letters disappear from the page, literally "whited out." There is discovery in the words themselves, little riddles to be worked at. Whiteout is a compelling story, a must-read.
July 24, 2017
How do we mourn those who are lost? This is the question that poet Jessica Goodfellow addresses in her newest collection Whiteout. When she was very young, her uncle, Steve Taylor, become part of the Wilcox Expedition to Denali, the highest mountain peak in North America. An unexpected storm hit the area, and only five of the twelve climbers came back home. Taylor was never found. Whiteout addresses the silence and hurt of loss when so many questions are left unanswered. I loved this collection, but two lines, found in her poem,"Unchronicled" really stuck with me: "The well-behaved dead are supposed to leave us a body. When they don't, we don't like to speak of it." An emotional and brilliant read!
April 14, 2022
Wonderful book of poetry on her uncle’s death on Denali in 1967.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews