A Case for Solace

by Liz Ahl

Liz Ahl's second full-length collection contemplates grieving and the quests for solace that guide - for better and for worse - living in the face of loss. The losses in this book - of life, of health, of ways of thinking - create absences in which poems seek balance between what is lost and what remains.

Genres: Poetry

66 pages, Paperback

Published October 12, 2022

About the author

Liz Ahl is a poet and teacher who lives in New Hampshire. Her most recent poetry collection, Beating the Bounds, was published in 2017 by Hobblebush Books. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Measure, Prairie Schooner, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, and North American Review, among other journals. Her work has also been included in several anthologies, including Show Us Your Papers (Main Street Rag, 2020), Nasty Women Poets (Lost Horse Press, 2017), and This Assignment Is So Gay (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2013), among others. Her first chapbook, A Thirst That’s Partly Mine, won the 2008 Slapering Hol chapbook contest. She has been awarded residencies at Jentel, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Playa Artist Residency Program, and the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow.

Reviews

[Jenna]

Ahl's latest book explores the grief surrounding the deaths of a father, a student, and several friends, while also grappling with firsthand experience of illness and the age-related stumbles of the poet's own body. This may sound like dark fare, but as the book's title says, the poet comes down firmly on the side of hope and affirmation -- not in a schmaltzy way, but through sharply carved lines ringing with toughness and authenticity. The poet does not balk at observing and recording the most painful details of loss, but she also reminds us that there is plenty of goodness and beauty in the world notwithstanding: flowers on the roadside and in the yard (rural New Hampshire is a major character in this book), friends who sing along to the radio with you, spouses who braid your hair for you, coworkers who bring you sandwiches and "two kinds of chips" when you are deep in mourning, siblings who inject you with your subdermal medications when you are "nervous of the needle," loved ones who wake up early to pick you up from the bus depot.

Among other books I've read recently, A Case for Solace reminds me most of Jill McDonough's Here All Night , with its gregarious yet tightly crafted free verse, its rapturous poem endings with their sublime emotional crescendos, its extroverted tendency to use the poet's friends as material in the most loving of ways. Here are some lines I underscored because I was awed by their magnificence: "The delicate bubble...greasing its exquisite circumference / with a thin rainbow before it popped"; "sunlight's unmediated / and murderous extravagance"; "the familiar rolodex / of dreams and digestion." My favorite poems included "My Father's Tools," "When to Eat the Peach" (the answer to the title's question: "between taut flesh biting back / and formless surrender, // the slenderest blink"), "For My Fellow Travelers at the End of the Day-Long Trip," "On the Annual July 4 Reading of 'Song of Myself'" (a villanelle so well-turned that it should win over even the most hardened of villanelle skeptics), and "On the Eve of Social Distancing." Here are the last five lines of "For My Fellow Travelers":

"I hope I won't forget the way
the glow of that scruffy kid's phone
lit up his sleepy face, showing me
how he always looks
to those who love him best."



Here is my Goodreads review of Ahl's prior collection Home Economics: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

The frequency in which I dole out 5 stars does this collection a disservice.

[Melissa]

Liz Ahl is among my very favorite poets currently writing today, and this collection is a superb example of why. She sees deeply, feels deeply, communicates deeply, but in an idiom readily understandable by any audience. I love her plain style--not straightforward, nor simple, but wonderfully clear as the shallow waters of a cold, small stream, through which you can see to the bottom. Just beautiful, heart-wrenching, and oh, so human. Her skill in drilling through a memory to its core and extracting the kernel of truth in feeling, rather than sentiment, is stunning.

[Ron Mohring · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been a fan of Liz's poems for many years, and the publication of this, her second full-length collection, is indeed cause for joy. Liz is so adept at seeing the details others might pass by, and the poems she makes of them are incredibly tight, sure-footed, heart-wrenchingly precise. I was hooked from the opening stanza.

[Jessica]

On the Birthday of My Lover’s Dead Student and the Day of Her New Book Launch, I Stand in My Basement Looking Out at the House Where I Tried to Hang Myself in the Last Basement, and Do Not Get Afraid of My Hands

I fold the warm clothes I’ve just gathered from the dryer
instead. But first, I sob. And stare through the narrow window, peer
past that other house, and too, all the trees. What an ugly word, but I do
do it — brace myself with my hands against the washer’s
cold frame, and shake, violent, all the energy
I must not let out. Every year this place make me less
afraid: all unfinished beams and damp walls, cement
sleep, though for years, even the doors down
made me vomit, violent, shake, all
that energy I could not
get out.

I know you want to know
what all of this has to do

with my lover, her student
dead, having gone, vaguely, into the river.

So do I, staring at that house, on the next
street over. I know it’s my job to draw
all the lines — from that house,
to this one, from that house’s lover, straight
and clear to this one.

I’m the one with the hands, after all.

I’m the one
with the body,
sobbing, at the cover
of her last lover’s book — Bruegel’s
Landscape, brazen, with Icarus’s fall
into the water.

I’m the one with the body,
marred, which she said reminded her,
from the first day, in class, of her own, less
successful, (once-) suicidal brother. I’m
the one, after all, who won her dead
student’s scholarship, sifted
through all his poems for the yearly
memorial, and sat with her while she cried
about him. I’m the one getting gifts
from his grandmother
in the mail.

I know I’m the one
with the legacy

here — a body knotted, falling
into its own abyss, but god,
I can explain

none of this. Instead I sink
to the dirty concrete, lay
my palms and remember waking,
years ago, with my cheek against a floor
just like it. Nearly
an apology, I touch it
more gently than even
my own body. I know
there are fields to plough, books
to be published. The river rushes
and the wooden beams are as sturdy
as they ever were. Siblings juxtapose
and disavow their own weakness
onto each other
everyday. I know I’m the one
unemployed, unpublished,
on my knees, with all my lovers’ hands,
suspiciously, to my throat, but god,
the fabric — warm, soft, fold
after fold.


*


I wrote this a few weeks ago. I posted it here 10 days ago, deleted it 8 days ago. But a week ago I wrote a silly, ridiculous, genuine email to Judith Butler, & days before that I finished their book Antigone's Claim . But no, last night I went to Red River Theater & saw the film Tár & did not get afraid of my hands when they revealed the girl killed herself. The most emotional scene, for me, was L. Tár, sitting alone in her shitty childhood bedroom, watching an old recorded VHS of (apparently) Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts," Tár crying for the first time in the film, as Bernstein talks about how the wonderful thing about music is that it holds emotions we have no words for. Not only did I cry, but my entire body was filled with an emotion I have no name for. Some vague sorrow for my own L., perhaps, or for all of us -- filled with emotions, unnameable, animating our bodies, turning us -- strangely, beautifully, terribly -- towards & away, towards & away from one another. But no, even so, I don't think the film was complex enough. Could anything ever hold the complexity? I wonder.

*

And so: my email to Judith Butler -- but, first, bits from Antigone's Claim, on.... uh.... Lacan, the symbolic order, "the Real," the unintelligible, suicide, the cultural horizon of intelligibility, the connection between the unintelligible & death, this death as a kind of "social death"; on language & discourse & curses & fate & the strangeness of agency & the small circle of discourse which becomes our fate; on the curse that is the "echoing of the father's word" inside of the subject; on the fascination & beauty & horror of someone speaking from the limit of un/intelligibility, from the boundary between life & (social) death:

"The symbolic might be understood as a certain kind of tomb that does not precisely extinguish that which nevertheless remains living, trapped within its terms, a site where Antigone, already half-dead within the intelligible, is bound not to survive [!]. On this reading, the symbolic thus captures Antigone, & though she commits suicide in that tomb, there remains a question of whether or not she might signify in a way that exceeds the reach of the symbolic."

*

"She acts, she defies the law, knowing that death is the punishment, but what propels her action? And what propels her action toward death? It would be easier to say that Creon killed her, but Creon banishes her only to a living death, and it is within that tomb that she takes her life. It might be possible to say that she authors her own death, but what legacy of acts is being worked out through the instrument of her agency? Is her fatality a necessity? And if not, under what non-necessary conditions does her fatality come to appear as necessary?"

*

"How do we understand this strange place of being between life & death, of speaking precisely from that vacillating boundary? If she is dead in some sense & yet speaks, she is precisely the one with no place who nevertheless seeks to claim one within speech, the unintelligible as it emerges within the intelligible."

*

"How does one grieve from within the presumption of criminality, from within the presumption that one's acts are invariably & fatally criminal?

Consider that Antigone is trying to grieve, to grieve openly, publicly, under conditions in which grief is explicitly prohibited by an edict that assumes the criminality of grieving Polyneices & names as criminal anyone who would call the authority of that edict into question. She is one for whom open grieving is itself a crime. But is she guilty only bc of the words that are upon her, words that come from elsewhere, or has she also sought to destroy & repudiate the very bonds of kinship that she now claims entitlement to grieve? She is grieving her brother, but part of what remains unspoken in that grief is the grief she has for her father, &, indeed, her other brother. Her mother remains almost fully unspeakable, & there is hardly a trace of grief for her sister, Ismene, whom she has explicitly repudiated. The "brother" is no singular place for her, though it may well be that all her brothers (Oedipus, Polyneices, Eteocles) are condensed at the exposed body of Polyneices, an exposure she seeks to cover, a nakedness she would rather not see, or have seen."

*

"We might ask what remains unspeakable here, not in order to produce speech that will fill the gap, but to ask abt the convergence of social prohibition & melancholia, how the condemnations under which one lives turn into repudiation that one performs, & how the grievances that emerge against the public law also constitute conflicted efforts to overcome the muted rage of one's own repudiations. In confronting the unspeakable in "Antigone," are we confronting a socially instituted foreclosure of the intelligible, a socially instituted melancholia in which the unintelligible life emerges in language as a living body might be interred into a tomb?"

*

"But how surefire is a curse? Is there a way to break it?. . . if we are seized by this inheritance, is there a way to transmit that curse in aberrant form, exposing its fragility & fracture, in the repetition & reinstitution of its terms?"

And an email to Butler, a week ago -- a little ridiculous, sad, desperate, genuine -- with the subject titled

"Suffering (a Category Mistake?) -- Breaks in the Bond: Reflections on Kinship Trouble, Antigone's Claim, The Force of Nonviolence, Precarious Life, and, and, and --":

Hi, hello .... Judith (?), Dr. (?)... Butler....(?), Professor.... (?) Butler,


"Not everyone can disown anyone else; if a stranger seeks to disown me legally, I would find that strange, if not intriguing. I would assume that the person suffered a category mistake, or mistook me for one of his relatives -- a kind of street transference that really does happen when stray people suddenly yell at you as if you are a relative." (from "Breaks in the Bond")

I just finished reading your lecture "Breaks in the Bond: Reflections on Kinship Trouble" a few minutes ago, and have somehow found myself here, in an email, writing, to you, addressing you; "a stray person" preparing to send an address to a "stranger" -- a stranger who may never even receive my address -- as if you were a kind of relative.

What has seized me, I can't quite tell you, really. I'm not sure you will ever receive, read, or "get" this address, but alas, I seem compelled, now? I can't tell you exactly, certainly, what has seized me, but I'm tempted to give a kind of quite-truthful-speculative "account of myself", even so.

Who am I? Who are you? Who are you, to me? Who am I, to you?

My name is Jessica Chretien, I'm 29 years old (or, so they say), and I "live" in New Hampshire. Sometimes I feel a bit like I am speaking from that vacillating boundary between life and death -- perhaps you know something about it, I don't know. "Bonds" feel pretty strange to me. My father went to prison for fifteen years when I was four, and my mother was -- still is -- "an addict;" my brother and I were "raised by" my paternal grandmother and step grandfather. My grandfather drank and was violent, but more violent when he wasn't drinking. I was the only one he was violent with (that is, until he hit my grandmother for the first time and she left him, when I was 18). Somewhere in the middle of this I began harming myself and didn't stop for nine years -- my body is covered in scars, which I mostly do not hide.

Right now I am writing to you from inside the house of a previous partner who I finally left five years ago, three weeks after he choked me unconscious, after five years of intimacy, after a year and a half of violence. I had to move back into this house, the house he choked me in, during the pandemic, when I finally graduated with my bachelors and had to move out of the campus apartment I had taken out loans to pay for.

------- But ah -- already I feel unintelligible, on a strange boundary of some kind. As if all these "facts" could only make sense if you received them all at once, woven together, seen through ten different disciplines, not merely listed, piecemeal, proceeding imperfectly, slowly, in time and space. Already I feel unintelligible, but I will try to keep speaking. ------- I wonder, if you ever read emails, who emails you? who is compelled to address you? Are these "stray persons" on the street trying to disown you, or trying to claim their kinship, or both? I wonder about those stray persons as I wonder about myself, now: how did they find your work, in what context? why are they addressing you personally, in an email, and not in/directly, in a scholarly paper, or in their own "communities", or in an article, or in a person journal entry, and so on and so on? Who are they? Who are you? Who are you, to them? And who are they, to you?

Well, in my case, I seem to be in a kind of painful exile from academia, or "my" "family," or, my lover(s), or all three, or, they are a little indistinguishable and maybe always have been. I first went to, failed out of, and finally graduated from, a small public university in New Hampshire. I won scholarships because of my family history, but I failed out and lost them. Even with Pell grants, I have $40,000 in loans. I have been on Social Security disability -- for the thing they/we call "mental health disability" -- for the last eight years; I receive $550 a month, a little more than $7,000 a year. The previous partner I live with makes over 100k a year. He has a family, kinship; though sometimes I wonder if they are not all a little more "messed up" than I am -- me, sitting in this house, with all these broken and enduring and fragile and ghostly bonds, writing this email to a stranger on the street. Ah, I wonder.

----- but oh, "education": I failed out after two years of terrible "mental health" and self harm, with a 1.87 GPA. Since I was young, I had wanted to "help people" and I was a social work major then, and later, at a community college. I have been in "therapy" for more than ten years, and continued with it, and when I went to the community college, a year after failing out, I managed a 3.3 GPA. I had to withdraw three months before graduating with an associates because the violence in that intimacy got too bad for me to function. When I finally left him, I went back to the first school I had failed out of, intending to finally finish a bachelors in social work. I had to retake classes I had failed -- classes like freshman surveys of feminism and literature -- to get matriculated again. When I was at the school before, the only A I ever got was in statistics; I got a C- in English Comp, and when I took it again, at the community college, a D.

[I feel a little unintelligible again, but perhaps because I don't want to take up your time, and there is so much in "my account" that feels so necessary for it to be intelligible. I will keep trying to balance them.] Soon after I left that intimacy, I reconnected with this girl I had met in that feminism class I had failed five years earlier. I think perhaps we "fell" "into" a kind of "love," but who knows, who knows. She was an English major. I had no idea what "English majors" even d i d. Once, I was trying to tell her about a therapy that helped me be more "well" -- "Dialectical Behavioral Therapy" -- and she said to me that it reminded her, literally, of the Critical Theory course she had taken her freshman year. She spoke, too, about something called "poststructuralism," but I had heard of neither of these poststructuralism, nor "Critical Theory." This was in the beginning of 2018, just under five years ago, during the first week I went back to school. I went home and Googled "post structuralism" and I found the concept of "post modernism" for the first time, too -- I watched video after video, some lectures, too. All of it felt exceptionally familiar to me, immediately. I mentioned earlier, in this "account" that I failed a class on feminism, and, of course, I found myself stuck inside an extremely disempowering intimacy with a cis man, so perhaps it seems, to you (ah -- "you" -- I'm reminded "you" are a stranger on the street, who may never hear my address. How delightful! and, too, a little sad) -- it may seem as if I knew (know?) nothing about social justice or feminist theory or anything, but of course I knew about these things -- in a very informal way, mostly through "popular discourse" on social media -- a discourse very "disconnected" from academia -- or else, I knew of these things through a social work lens, which was not very radical, frankly.

But, most of all, I had/have.... my body. "My" "body." All the hands that have "harmed" and "healed" it, including "my" "own." Even in my distance from academia I have tried, incessantly, to understand what my body undergoes, and what "I" have made it undergo. Even when that partner and I were deep into our harm, I/we never stopped trying to "Make Sense." Perhaps the one thing we did more than harm, was try to understand the harm (indeed, even now, five years later -- no longer intimate or violent in the ways we once were -- we are still trying to "Make Sense." I have even read some of Precarious Life to him, humorously). But god, how unintelligible it was (still is?). I have been reading "treatment manuals" and texts for therapists, even academic papers on "pathology" and "treatment," for a long time. Some of it changed my life, made my life more bearable. But Theory -- Theory..... saved my life, saves my life. The desire for power had always scared me and I wanted nothing to do with it, but, at some point, I realized that my desire to know, with certainty, was a kind of intense pursuit for power. Indeed, funnily enough, just before the intimate harm became worse, I had begun to read Freud's "An Outline of Psychoanalysis" and suddenly, intensely, realized that there was No Way To Know the Truth? I wanted nothing more than to not harm people, because I had been harmed, and I didn't trust myself to understand my motives, because of my own bias, but I thought maybe I could triangulate the truth about myself, by listening to other people's understanding of me. But there I was, reading that Freud -- who, of course I knew about, or, at least thought I did -- and my partner was in the room, and I read about the connection between aggression and love, and I remember being so afraid of it, I remember wondering if I was powerless in my intimacy, and if I used sex to master my own powerlessness. And most wildly of all, I remember wondering this, with a terrible anxiety, and, as I wondered it, I felt sexual desire rise up inside of me -- I watched my terror turn into desire, as I contemplated that very dynamic? And between this and realizing that, not only was I filled with an "unconscious," but other people were too (and thus could not really objectively help me see myself), I quite literally felt at once as if the world were very, very "unreal"? The whole world felt extremely unreal, but I still.... had to..... live in it?

(preposterously, yes, continued in comments)

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully organized volume that makes the case for solace by taking us through grief for a student, for a friend, for a father, for an ailing body and then slowly guiding us back to life through the beauty of nature and the soft pleasures of domestic life.
I had just read this Richard Wilbur quote: “one of the jobs of poetry is to make the unbearable bearable by clear, precise confrontation.” So this line from “About Suffering,” called it to mind: “With the vivid commitments of those verbs / I might make a case for solace.” This book confronts us with grief and, in clear, precise, and beautiful language, with the concrete lure of the details of being alive in a way that brings us back to the land of the living. Such a wise and lovely book!

[Nancy Welch · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't think of a better time to sit down with this superb collection of poems than with the approaching solstice. So it is at the very top of my "to re-read" list.