Review by Rebecca Jane
wolves in shells rewilds the experience of reading poetry. This collection achieves narrative justice for battered women, abandoned women, wolves hunted as game, and domestic experience. Here, language repositions spaces we dwell in to alter what we call home—empty pockets, empty mouths. “We survive by what we do and do not nurture, / and sometimes this requires teeth” (40). What happens to soft flesh when wolves are reintroduced from Canada to Yellowstone Park only to become prey of sport hunters? In a parallel narrative, what happens to a woman’s soft heart when an abusive father / husband / in-laws force her into homelessness? These poems echo over the range: howls of pain mutate into cries for freedom. Scenes shift across the continental U.S., from places like Michigan, Yellowstone, and Pennsylvania to Texas, Maine, Arkansas, and Lake Erie. Wandering is not aimless. Each poem is a snug nomad exploring contemplative terrain, different from the ways we think inside structures. Walls cannot contain a woman’s full being. These poems shine a light on abuse then show her holding red rocks, sea glass, and scuttles, all embodiments of resilience.
A woman grieving her dying grandmother sits “on the floor cradling a handful of shells, / rocking—in the future she will be mineral, calcium, phosphorus” (67). Kimberly Ann Priest is assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures at Michigan State University. Her four poetry books probe topics in gender-based trauma, domestic ecology, eco-poetics, and narrative justice. wolves in shells contains the same powerful, courageous, lyric intelligence as her collections Slaughter the One Bird and tether and lung.
In wolves in shells, the survivor expands her sense of home to be spaces that welcome ecological sensitivity. “I’ve howled at the moon I tell you, laughing, / watching my breath expire into a frozen plume” (27). This is not sentiment or romanticization but rather a comment compelling us to query living spaces:
My body was tired of the walls my husband sustained for us,
so I let the elements have me. Mollusk is derived from the Latin word
mollis—it means soft. To love a home is to let it evolve
like a body, to participate, to ask it what it wants to be. Kneeling
to the height of these pained structures I search
their shells for signs of ambulant life, hear only the animal silence.” (24)
Animal silence resonates through the whole collection, creating a warm den where human consciousness becomes free to venture into the dream realm of a mother wolf. What does it mean for a noble creature to occupy the space of a shell?
On the subject of spaces, Priest enlists the wisdom of philosopher Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard probed through a phenomenological lens in The Poetics of Space, exploring the ways homes, attics, cellars, corners, drawers, etc. shape and echo human consciousness. With the space of the page, Priest shows a method of lyrical unbuilding that fearlessly exposes the psychodynamics of survival, in the wild world, a solitary woman, turning her inquiry upon seashells, cold nights, a sleeping bag, a pocket holding a few dollar bills.
The poem “Field Note on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space” presents an image of a woman standing in a gift shop, holding a souvenir coin that features an image of a conch. The woman wants to hold the coin to her ear. This is a metaphor turned gesture, exposing the flattening of lived experience. These poems ask us to move beyond metaphor.
Inside homes, inside pockets, inside shells, and inside the human heart, life stirs and like the caged bird, “reach[es]beyond the glass with [ ] light-eliciting song because, surely, this is a portal” (34). Poems, in Priest’s collection, are also portals… to flee abuse. Just as dawn breaks and birds sing, any lone woman can learn to be both soft and fierce. And when she must, she can live to be her own pack.
Wolves in Shells by Kimberly Ann Priest
The Backwaters Press, an imprint of University of Nebraska Press 82 pages, paper $17.95 USA
ISBN: 978-1-4962-4370-6
Rebecca Jane is the author of She Bleeds Sestinas, which was a finalist for a Best Book Award in 2023. She works as a freelance writer, ghostwriter, and poet who travels to Asia to study yoga, Sanskrit, and Mandarin. She lives with her daughters on unceded Kumeyaay land. (San Diego, California).