Alissa Quart is a dervish of energy in multiple roles: journalist, filmmaker, cofounder and director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, author of numerous books. It’s hard to see how she finds the quiet mental space to write her spare and thought-provoking poems. (I’d like to know her secret.) “Compassion now / unfashionable,” she writes in “Only Witches,” a sentiment that seems truer by the day, what with half the country cheering the ouster of immigrants and the president celebrating his birthday with a bloody cage fight on the White House lawn.
The poem opens with a depressing scene of social decay, and yet, “Women go through so / much and still decide / to be kind.” Kindness as a decision—I love that thought, which recoups the connection of women with morality while disconnecting it from essentialism. “We are mystery animals / that will not scare” is a great line, which echoes the mother skunk in Robert Lowell’s great poem “Skunk Hour,” an ambiguous symbol of female vitality that “will not scare.” In fact, now that I think of it, the whole poem distantly echoes “Skunk Hour”: the depressing, crumbling scenery, references to illness and dread, and a feeling of entrapment in a declining society.
“Reunions” is lighter, a tender glimpse of the 1990s downtown scene. Sylvia Miles—remember her? Some people—some of your old classmates, for example—learn whole new fields in twenty years: French food, reading Korean. Others, like the poet, “just understand the same / thing over and over: sullied glamor.” Which are you, reader? Do you venture out into new areas of knowledge, astonishing someone you haven’t seen in years? Or do you ruminate on the same themes as when you walked home in the snow after dinner with a now-forgotten demi-icon? Can you be both?