University of Washington Press, hardback, 96 pages, $19.95<\/p>\n
Reviewed by Tami Haaland<\/p>\n
Inspired by Christopher Howell\u2019s ecstatic poem \u201cAnother Letter to the Soul,\u201d Melissa Kwasny\u2019s Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today<\/em> is a careful examination of the self, the natural world, the spirit and soul woven through with an awareness of language and indigenous traditions. In her worldview, words do not exist as arbitrary signifiers but are intricately connected to the conditions they represent: \u201cConsidered sunshine and its synonyms.\u201d \u201cConsidered peace and its synonym.\u201d In this way, Kwasny reaches for the ideas, phenomena and creatures that help her explore the relationship among soul, spirit, and self. Her implied questions, what in the world is like sunshine, what in the world is like peace,<\/em> begin to create a framework for her inquiry.<\/p>\n \u201cThe book begins, rightly, with the Killing Floor,\u201d says the speaker of Kwasny\u2019s opening poem, \u201cThe Hide and Skin Manual,\u201d and so she establishes mortality as the driving force of this collection, questioning what it is to age and die, how we understand trauma and change in the body, and how we understand soul and spirit in light of these frailties. In this opening work, she establishes, too, the interconnection between the human and animal world, refusing a clear delineation between the two. \u201cThe Hide and Skin Handbook\u201d considers our likeness to pigs and offers this surprising passage to flip our perception of animal-human relationships: \u201cThe Yupiit break the ice from the waterholes so the sea mammals can see them.\u201d In this way that humans are not the observers we think we are so much as the ones observed. In \u201cThe Hide and Skin Manual\u201d \u201cSun rises, as if under a spell,\u201d and so the spell of this elegant book begins.<\/p>\n Divided into eight sections, the book is beautifully symmetrical. Sections 1, 3, 5, and 7 are named after groups of people identified as people: \u201cThe Deer People,\u201d \u201cThe Blue Heron People,\u201d \u201cThe Hawk People,\u201d and \u201cThe Creek People,\u201d which corresponds to her earlier indication that there is no clear way to differentiate human from animal. The architecture of the book reaffirms that we are all people, and further that the soul \u201coutside the body\u201d may be found in the natural world and in those who inhabit it. In the poem \u201cThe Deer People,\u201d the speaker recounts actions: \u201cStepped into a spirit world where the natural show themselves. \/ Wearing a guise of the same.\u201d Between each of these sections are multi-part prose poems, all titled \u201cAnother Letter to the Soul.\u201d The sections of the book alternate, then, between observation of the world focused on various people where the speakers search for the soul and detailed letters addressed to the soul.<\/p>\n In Kwasny\u2019s cosmology, anything could be the soul. \u201cEvery known culture has taken upon itself\/ naming of the soul, usually in words for smoke or wind.\u201d \u201cIf I saw my soul she would be this tree\/ and I would love her\u201d (12). \u00a0Her work is informed, in part, by Dakota tradition: \u201cMy friend Lois says each person is divided into four parts . . . . Diaspora of the interior\u2014spirit, shadow, soul, and mind\u2014and our bodies, the hibernacula where they all rest.\u201d No wonder then, this book is full of such rich observation and immersion in the natural world as the author probes the primary question articulated in the title.<\/p>\n Kwasny\u2019s search is based on research, observation and contemplation, and it resonates broadly with universal themes such as this: if \u201cthis is not the life we thought we were here to live\u201d then what is it? In her pursuit, she speaks of the creatures \u201cwe don\u2019t discover.\u201d Instead, \u201cThey cross our paths.\u201d Her meticulous research is woven through this collection, often in surprising ways. For example, she speaks of the antelope as \u201cancestral members of a world we lost,\u201d and metaphorically, \u201c[c]oal seams set on fire by lightening,\u201d that is, something ancient making its appearance known in the contemporary world. This metaphor echoes a line from \u201cThe Deer People,\u201d \u201c[s]aw not particulars but glow.\u201d \u00a0In this same poem, she references the Greek origin of the antelope\u2019s name, a \u201cCheyenne word for tea,\u201d alludes to the antelope miming tragedy which reverberates back to Greek origins, and implies that they are known for their speed, which brings to mind recent speculations that their speed allowed them to survive the saber-toothed cats from the last ice age.<\/p>\n The soul may be one of the riskiest and most difficult topics, prone to an overlay of clich\u00e9, dogma, or wild and airy speculation, and it is also one of the most-worthy topics in a world prone to increasing digital overload. Kwasny, in her careful and respectful way, dodges the pitfalls to undertake and document a genuine search. Through meticulous observation of the natural world, a respect for language that refuses to see words as simple abstractions disconnected from what they reference, and a deep regard for American Indian traditions, Kwasny creates a coherent and carefully orchestrated collection. That we are all mortal skin and bones is her starting point. The idea that \u201cthe soul, as opposed to the spirit, really is of the earth. Soul as something that surrounds us, which we grow into\u201d is at least one of her possible conclusions. In the end, it is the earth that she loves: \u201cI am drawn to the infinity that is earth. Rock, its own shape, own meaning, not ours. The weight-bearing, sun burnt character of its slopes.\u201d<\/p>\n This is the voice of mature wisdom and meditation, and in a world where so much threatens the earth and its people, both human and non-human, we will do well to pay attention.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" University of Washington Press, hardback, 96 pages, $19.95 Reviewed by Tami Haaland Inspired by Christopher Howell\u2019s ecstatic poem \u201cAnother Letter to the Soul,\u201d Melissa Kwasny\u2019s Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today is a careful examination of the self, the natural world, the spirit and soul woven through with an awareness of language and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164,"featured_media":1361,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[160,214,215,167,217,216],"class_list":["post-1359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-basaltblog","category-reviews","tag-contemporary-american-poetry","tag-melissa-kwasny","tag-montana-poet-laureate","tag-tami-haaland","tag-university-of-washington-press","tag-where-outside-the-body-is-the-soul-today"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1359"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1362,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359\/revisions\/1362"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}