Book Review: At the Threshold of Alchemy by John Amen
At the Threshold of Alchemy
by John Amen
Reviewed by Megan Roth Casella
As the title conveys, John Amen’s collection At the Threshold of Alchemy is a glorious combination of voices, passions, and raw memories. Little is lyricized, overdressed, or neatly packaged in this stirring collection of poetry that seems to pulse and drip, living on the page in forms that never promise neat resolution or resolve. Amen’s poems, instead, beat like the “pulses beneath blush and bone” as in “Purpose,” the collection’s opening piece. We enter the collection with a sense that we won’t be led through a tunnel of glass, but rather, we will be shown into an interior world, a warm, dark place full of things living, things happening, things unstill.In Amen’s “After the Funeral,” perhaps one of the most striking pieces, images are placed in clear view, and white space is left for each stanza’s image to be absorbed and viewed from all angles.
Grandma slouched in the foyer
Her belly mounding in her lap, makeup streaked
I distracted myself in the basement, thinking
Of Ms. Gilham, my face in her cleavage.
The juxtaposition of the grandmother, her mounding belly and streaked face, with the thought of a child masturbating below in the bowels of the home dreaming of cleavage, creates a swirl of magnificent tension and a sense of the grotesque. The last stanza proceeds:
I reemerged,
Dad and his brother gnawing the gristly silence.
No one noticed the stain on my corduroys
Or saw me put a silver spoon in my pocket.
The image of the shiny spoon leaves the reader with a glimmer of something, though it feels much unlike a sweet glimmer of hope, and more like a promise of truth hidden in the depth of a dark pocket. Layers of tension are embedded into the landscape of a multistoried home, as raw humanness unfolds in the basement while a sterility is frantically formed above—a metaphor Amen will extend throughout this magnificent book.
Perhaps most consuming are Amen’s prose poems that occupy a large portion of Alchemy’s pages. In them, he hand-addresses subjects of the past who become, in a sense, mythologized by the passionate modes of the speaker—anger, remorse, memory, humility. Amen’s line is merciless—it coats nothing with language. Here, language is a clear liquid, a bright light.
The narrator shows tenderness for the mundane, and such humility in memory and in recounting past action, artifacts, and connections. “Curse,” for example, explores the historical demographics of the family psyche, observing the hardships of the mother and cataloguing painful psychological records of ancestry. Amen writes, “how / for at least three generations we’ve become masters / at burying trauma inside our own bodies, brokenness / we have no language and lack the resolve to voice” (33).
This moment defines Alchemy’s project in a way, as the book travels through verse and prose poetry, finding language to express this edgy feeling of uncertainty; Amen combines artifacts of the past together in the hope of finding answers in the concoction, the combination, the interaction between fragments of the past and present. As the title suggests, this project is one of gathering rather than measuring and forming solution. Amen gathers the language and raw materials of a tumultuous history and collages them into letters, rhythms, and imagistic moments, displaying the many prisms of a voice and a past truly at a threshold of something profound.
John Amen is the author of two previous poetry collections: Christening the Dancer (Uccelli Press 2003) and More of Me Disappears (Cross-Cultural Communications 2005). He is an artist, working primarily with acrylics on canvas. He founded and continues to edit The Pedestal Magazine.
Megan Roth Casella is a James Michener Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Miami. Her poetry and prose have appeared in various journals such as The Rose and Thorn Ezine, Elimae, and POEM, and she is the author of The Green Guide to Daily Living (Cliff Road Books, 2009), a nonfiction work designed to help the world go greener. More information at Megan's Web site.
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