Book Review

Like Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” Dickinson’s “Hope is a thing with feathers—/ that perches in the soul” always struck me as a poem that could be understood two ways. Why is hope a bird? It always seems ironic that the bird flies out of reach. It’s ungraspable, a bit too pithy in its sentimentality, and by the end of poem, hope does not ask a crumb of the speaker. For me, there’s always the other reading: Despite its often “good intentions,” hope is an absent gesture.

In Andrea Werblin Reid’s dazzling collection, To See Yourself As You Vanish, the poet, who died of ovarian cancer in 2022, sees the word in just this way. Hope is variously a “toxic stem,” a “false, grave fancy” and an “inflatable idea” easily “punctured.” At the outset of the book, she aims to seek truth at all costs:

hope is the most ridiculous option on the table.

it’s a silent creeper, sweet-veined rosebud offering up

pinpricks of light. i wouldn’t let that in if i were you.

there’s nothing innocent about it.

These remarkably honest sixty-eight poems, written in the last three years of Reid’s life, interrogate the inadequacy of language in the face of death as well as track how her thinking evolves as death becomes more and more visible. It’s a harrowing journey to take, yet resplendent in gifts.

Reid hesitated writing about her experience because she did not want to be known as a “cancer poet.” The beauty of her book is that all readers will experience the trajectory and the unvarnished realities of living with cancer. Early poem titles vivify these realities and include the communal despair of “Online Support Groups,” the well-intentioned but powerless “Sorry Sorry” emitted by friends and acquaintances as well as “The Color of Waiting” that includes bearing with “the serrated smiles / doctors have been honing for years.”  The poem also shows Reid’s virtuosity in poetry as well as her humor as the color of waiting turns to sound:

waiting is rosy, a soft-spun

medical soundtrack of static

frizz, machine screech

The poems themselves mutate, often highlighting the small beauties of the world that we often take for granted.

Watch these transformations in “Language Is a Virus” as she dispels the myth of “fighting cancer”:

. . . to die is not to lose. survive is not akin to conquer. as for

   guarantees, there

aren’t any anyway, only sonnets

and foxes and the memory of her crinkly hand on the doorknob.

Throughout the book, except for a few exceptions, Reid uses the second person. As a result, the you of the reflected Andi Werblin Reid includes the reader. Her cry is clear: Appreciate even the troubles and what-ifs of life. The first lines in “Your Stupid Ignorant Beautiful Self in the Time Before Everything Happened”:

thinking about teeth and lemons and the art of macarons, which are still too

fancy for you:

oh, i’ll travel. i will luxuriate on islands, seduced by fatigue and the geometry of

coconuts.

thinking, no rush on that. thinking you’ll love some particular song for the

sake of the song,

for radical enjoyment, reading nothing into its lyrics of talismans and dark

times. . . .

It is just like the accompanying illustrations in the book: A shadow play of figures arriving and retreating by the artist duo Bensley and Dipré, the imagery of mutability becomes transformative the deeper we read. The mechanics of healing, though dire, can become fantastical. In “Port, The Definition” the “vehicle embedded above your breast” where blood is drawn and the “poisonous” liquids enter, is also “a passageway. a maritime facility, pretty / as a postcard, the place where charming boats / arrive after their adventures. a haven.”

There’s much here for those who have or are still suffering from cancer and its treatments. In “Keep Living” and other poems, Reid entreats these readers, whose “days are drums & echoes / of drums” and who experience “the animal crescendo / of someone else’s final days” to accept their own fallible humanity and revel in the properties of this dimension. “[A]ll living tissue feels like flattery” Reid writes “like earth serenading after earth.”

Reid’s wry humor comes through often, even redirecting a poem built on sentimental assumptions. In “Hereafter” she blows up the myth that the dead look down from the stars:

seriously. science says that given the opportunity, stars will suck

the life from planets and eventually explode. so, not as romantic

as you’d thought. if not stars then quotation marks, surely.

punctuation as a guide to the afterlife. choose what helps you sleep.

The heart-rending last several poems are as revelatory as they are frank about the process of letting go. In “When You’re Done,” she impels that reflected you to let go of anger and resentments to “release the cluster of fossils you hold fast to, / place your brain into orbit like a twinkling satellite.”

My favorite, the poem “Address” narrated by the floating speaker “untethered, unterrestrial, amidst the lakes of stars” looks for a place to land. By the end, Reid writes:

you live in every difficult decision. by cool creeks, along highways and in

long, questioning gazes at waxing moons.

you live in us because you are us. we don’t know where you are, but we know

where you live. you are home.

To See Yourself as You Vanish makes cancer and its treatments visible and impels readers to look at death squarely. It’s a book that won’t take no for an answer.