to empathetic imagination. Claire Wahmanholm’s Wilder is a mythopo-etic investigation into how we might make meaning and beauty out of
apocalyptic catastrophe. She uses scientific works such as Carl Sagan’s
Cosmos and Lewis Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell as source material for
erasures or jumping-off points for new fairy tales that might provide
new morals and dreams to people whose old stories failed to stop, or in
some cases even justified, the ongoing ecological catastrophes.
Wilder is a book about losing the way and becoming bewildered and
wild. The scale of ecological catastrophe scientists have described for us,
the number of species already lost compared to the number that will be
lost, the acres of felled trees, tons of melted ice: it is bewildering to be a
single human facing the vastness of so much human-caused destruction. Where some people cope with this grief via the escapism of zombie
apocalypse movies, the construction of elaborate prepper basements, or
other distractions, Wahmanholm has written fairy tales for survivors
after the coming apocalypse. Given how much loss we are already living
after, these poems also read like the perfect fairy tales for the present
moment.
Wahmanholm opens the book with “Descent,” imagining the kinds
of children who might find themselves growing up in the midst of cat-
aclysm. “Whose faces are wild fields; / whose throats are peaches, and
voiceless.” Walmanolm imagines how the future might hear the lives of
our children or grandchildren described. She predicts how future gen-
erations will tell the story of this age of environmental destruction, how
they will
copy onto paper—tales of ancient children
who vanished in a flood,
who stumbled from the spring,
who hid inside a haunted wood
to save themselves from drowning.
Wilder
Claire Wahmanholm. Milkweed Editions,
2019, 96 pp., $16.00, paper
