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Estuary
Estuary
Adaptation is necessary here. Animals need
mixture and movement. This is an annual rest
site, a pause in long days of flight, a vernal
and autumnal pit-stop, a conjugal meeting for salmon.
Sand moves by saltation: small stones skipping
through the bedload like POGs, the toys I used to collect
from the bottom of juice cartons. A game of discs
slamming into discs. We are searching for something,
something to carry home and not kill.
Dead sand dollars, veil white, scatter the surface.
We spin them into wind, white kites rising,
displacing seagulls and landing in a chuppah
of cottonwoods. We want the length of beach,
and the smell of burning driftwood. We covet the meeting
of two waters—a marriage of solutions. We shudder
to be sluiced by salt. We want the diverse and sudden
calls rising on the wind to be united in a shivaree
of plovers, on an altar of air, the flash of white shoulders.
Jeremy Voigt’s bright and beautiful book of poems begins: “I must find something forgotten/by everyone alive.” His poems reflect upon people, plovers, pistols, and pigeons. He tells us nine billion passenger pigeons arrived with the Mayflower and we ate them like chickens until there were no more. He celebrates an old crow in an Audubon Park chewing on a squirrel carcass. Part bestiary, part family album, part dispatch, the poems thrum with wings and rattle with bones. Voigt recounts his history with his single mother affected by the disease of alcoholism who: “died believing/I did not forgive her./Though I said the words.” On another page he washes his newborn son: “I hold his head/between two fingers.” The poems share a spectrum of joys and disappointments, so that you turn the page saying to yourself, “Yes, yes, life’s like that.” A modern married Thoreau, Voigt rollicks, runs, writes, wrangles, and rears his children with a loving wife in the magical state of Washington. I am grateful for these new-fangled earthy rhapsodies. As I read this book, heaven moved under my feet.
—Spencer Reece
These uncompromising and deeply moving poems hold the self, the flawed mother, our violent culture, even beautiful, brutal nature to account while holding them close. Jeremy Voigt's project is seeking out truth, which he finds over and over–with the trash in the dunes, in empties hidden around a room, or written on an unborn child's ultrasound. His poems pull the reader into their slipstreams and thrillingly close to bedrock and bone. Something to Carry Home and Not Kill is a brave and remarkable collection by a wonderful poet.
—Kathleen Flenniken
Sometimes you can just feel the difference between “career” and genuine urgencies in a poem. Jeremy Voigt’s deliver a conviction that their author needed to write them. Because his work was familiar, it was no surprise to find myself pulled into the energy of each poem; but I was surprised to discover that the whole collection works like that, one poem leading to the next with a compelling insistence. Voigt is not a poetic sprinter, but a long distance runner. His pace is measured and sure, and there is a sense that the reader is being drawn forward even as the poet must have been. “I tell myself/to be grateful,” says Voigt in this twisting, cross country course of a book, and though the themes he unflinchingly deals with are often difficult, there is an underlying insistence on both accommodating grief and recognizing grace.
—Samuel Green
In Jeremy Voigt’s remarkable debut, Something to Carry Home and Not Kill, human beings not only find themselves at the top of the food chain but end up being indicted for the suffering they have caused along that rapacious drunken way. The nuclear family gets staged as the site of an old catastrophe that pulses outward in ever-widening rings to the far corners of the natural world, birdsongs and poet songs locked in an inextricable dance. Innocence may well be butchered by the able hands of experience, but what remains are forms that might well be worth saving over the lives that made them possible.
—Timothy Liu
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