☀ What Sparks Poetry: Michael Dumanis on Natalie Eilbert's "Overland"

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July 31, 2023

What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Books We’ve Loved, poets reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the book and an excerpt from the essay.

Edge Habitat

Natalie Eilbert

I have fisted a landful of grass and I have rubbed it. I have rubbed it
across the torso of my belonging. These little possessions, how I fiend
on them, call them mine. My pockets lined with cuts. A satin, leaking gel.
I do not miss the world I never asked for. That's not it. A house is nothing
but a suffocation of grasses. None, I want. I force a newborn from my mind.
A limb entwined with mine. I forget the word for minefield. I walk in this
forgetting. The swirl of my daughter's hair is silken, not there. I wade in
the muck of not, brothered by gray waters, fugitive dust. A new mother
on Instagram, the caption, "Babies smell so good." But I can't. The wind
cuts a line across a stone lion slowly. It takes years to etch. Programs
emerge, calls for new budgets, mitigation plans, new insurance laws.
Let me contain this how I cannot the girl I dreamed named Daisy. A
dehisced sprout. Poison ivy, its ecological importance. I dig into my tote
bag and produce a recording device. To record this interview, do I have
consent? Fat white berries fruit as birds migrate south. A new development
pumps up leaded water, an offering. The daughter blooms as a throat constriction.
I respond to dating apps. Something mothers in me as it did when I read
the suicided student's poems. Bees are the hive or the loss itself. Something erases
in the green. But the words are sometimes beautiful. Cadmium. I am not
phosphorus. Nor iridium. A world outside leaches in. I equivocate when
pleasured. I lock the door, bolt it shut. And I itch at the borders of subdivisions
in my head. Learn I am not no longer not immune to the urushiol of contracts,
the living oil of greedy men constructing high-rises and future evictions. Concrete
partitions to keep a fire burning one unit entire. The exurban dream of it all—
to enter is to have the ability to exit. My throat inflamed with understory, its
diminishment part of an incremental payment plan. You wished me to understand
top-down economics, third-party predators, the moneyed saliva of ownership.
Daisy in chains, a daughter I never. A housing agent screams into a bouquet of mics
and far from here, the ivy tickles the snout of a doe. She disappears like a Cher song
into ambient techno frost. I carry the elsewhere buzz of life under my nails, digging.

from the book OVERLAND / Copper Canyon Press

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What Sparks Poetry:
Michael Dumanis on Natalie Eilbert's Overland
"The word 'overland' connotes an arduous journey, a direct engagement with the environment and the vicissitude of nature. Broken into its constituent parts, 'over land,' the term is also the root of global disputes, why nations go to war. 'Over' can mean about, but also done, finis, kaput. But this is more a book of journey through life than despair at it."

READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

Jane Huffman Reviews Rae Armantrout’s Finalists
"In an Armantrout poem, the ordering principles are often clear: she tends to separate her short stanzas by section breaks or numerals, visual signifiers of transition. But even these moments of organization are untrustworthy."
via The Hopkins Review

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