September 5, 2024
“Dear Inheritors”
Kathy Engel
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The title of Kathy Engel’s new collection, “Dear Inheritors,” is a greeting, what in the parlance of letter writing we call the salutation. To greet, to open a channel for connection, to signal friendliness over suspicion: This sociable act, this most human/humane of verbs, is characteristic of Ms. Engel’s lively, timely collection.
Her poems don’t sit still, even when meditating on serious subjects. Someone knocks, they jump up to answer the door. Many, as the title suggests, take the form of direct address, to the reader or a friend or the poet’s beloved or the poet Mosab Abu Toha, enduring Gaza’s horrors. All of these poems are superb hosts, which is not to say they don’t pack some tough truth. They do. They just don’t deliver it in a monologue. Truth, as Ms. Engel sees it, is a conversation.
Take the first line of “August letter to a poet,” for example: “This gorgeous country loves to make a summer,” it reads, and deftly invites us in. But by the second line, we’re deep in conversation, and by line five, we’re asking big questions about the violence that this country also seems to love. Here’s the whole passage:
This gorgeous country loves to make a summer
orphan or take a parent’s child. The tree will soon
articulate its loss, first flush, then naked limbs.
Geese announce their discipline. What can I
discover from their V-shaped flight?
One such discovery later in the poem comes in the rhetoric of invitation: “Let’s train each muscle’s syllabus / of love no matter the attempts to rip it raw.” Love answers violence, love is urgent, but it’s urgent without the urging. A lesser poet would have written “Train each muscle’s syllabus” instead of “Let’s train each muscle’s syllabus.” Throughout this collection, Ms. Engel explores the conversation between love and violence alongside the language we use to express both. We can do violence with words; we can also enact love with them, by using “Let’s” instead of the command form of “train,” a grammar shaped by love. And “love is an action,” the poem “What’s Another Word for Genocide?” reminds us.
Symbols other than words contain similarly contrasting potentials, and Ms. Engel explores those as well. “Now listen,” a poem written “On the occasion of the rescinding of Angela Davis’s Fred Shuttlesworth Award by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,” as the epigraph tells us, ends with this powerful image:
Dear Birmingham
you can’t rescind
a daughter:
Angela
messenger
of the gods
you can’t un
light
a torch
The line break at “un” breaks more than a line, it breaks a whole history of oppression, converting a No into a Yes, converting symbolic violence into love, and leaving us with the thing we can do: light a torch. This line break, one that would do Eileen Myles proud, is not the only flash of technical mastery. Lots of poems take on forms, playfully and expertly. One is modeled on Gwendolyn Brooks’s “When you have forgotten Sundays,” another writes itself forward, and then backward. Tankas abound.
“Dear Inheritors” is brimming with poems either written during or recalling the Covid pandemic. Remembering how starved we all were for physical touch, even as we were horrified by it, remembering how connection then was both salvation and death, this collection begins the necessary work of processing that trauma, always in the context of the many other traumas (war, the mass graves of Indigenous children, victims of police brutality) that humans inflict on one another.
Ms. Engel has lit a torch. Let’s look up to see the “democracy of birds in flight,” for there are “no borders in the air,” let’s listen, let’s read our way forward, let’s follow the light.
Julie Sheehan is an associate professor in the creative writing program at Stony Brook’s Lichtenstein Center and the author of poetry collections including “Bar Book.” She lives in East Quogue.
Kathy Engel of Sagaponack is an associate arts professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
On “The Lost Brother Alphabet” (GetFresh Books, 2020)
“It is an amazing book. The Lost Brother Alphabet breaks my heart and delights my spirit at the same time. As Engel’s love of language rises to the occasion of unquenched love for a “handsome, flirting…insatiable…gone” brother, dead by his own hand, memory and mystery, grief and wordplay coexist in this extraordinary suite of poems, disciplined and delicate, vibrant with life even as they mourn their loss. You will never read another book like this one.”
– Alicia Ostriker, feminist poet and scholar.
“Fiercely lyrical is the phrase that comes to mind when I consider the whole of Kathy Engel’s The Lost Brother Alphabet, a multi-layered poetry collection as elegiac and intimate as it is politically urgent, as temporal and rooted as it is ontological. While again and again seeking to encompass a brother’s suicide and a beloved father’s death, the poems, themselves, are uncontained, exhibiting a formal inventiveness and restless intelligence that upend the usual equations.”
– Alison Meyers, Mom Egg Reviews
“Ms. Engel never hides behind a persona; her loss and her grief are too personal, too powerful to obscure with a mask. She wants us to know that this is her experience, her existential struggle, which must somehow be overcome or transformed for her to live, and she lays bare her emotional response to it. The poems attempt to create meaning from loss, that quintessential human endeavor; they ask the questions that grief provokes.”
– Dan Giancola, East Hampton Star
“Kathy’s connection to existences beyond life blurs the line between life and death. The blurred line allows us, as readers, to see how life exists in deaths, and how deaths are intricately a part of life. Through humility, Kathy articulates the world in words that are palatable to the senses: the alphabet dances through the pages in steps of alliteration, the powerful settings are invigorated through personified imagery, and the historical influences obfuscate the division between past and present. The Lost Brother Alphabet reminds us that breath, nature, earth, animals, life, death, past, and present, are all one. Kathy reminds us that as human beings, we are each small existences existing with other small existences, collectively creating the grandeur that is our truth.”
– Mercy Tullis-Bukhari, author of Smoke and Mango
On “Dreaming Neruda”
“The speaker in today’s poem is engaged in the activity of “imagining neruda”—imagining how someone of such vision could ever and might again exist—but she is also walking the talk, engaged in the very activity she asks Neruda about: speaking a poem that can give readers hope. It’s not a fond or naïve hope, but an informed and therefore courageous one. And on this, the eve of the election of the next president of our United States, that kind of hope is very much what we need.”
– Rebecca Foust, editor of Women’s Voice For Change.
On “Where I Live”
“A major work – a door opening to reveal the glitter of something sweet. The Whitman embrace – the Ginsberg sound – the passion of Jordan and Lorde. Family, place, history and politics – the personal is all here. This is a rescue poem – pulling us all back to the work we must do. The sea yet to be calm during these turbulent times – but peace be still is what I hear these words saying. This poem restores my faith and the belief that one can walk on water out of desolation and despair into a new tomorrow if not a new world. Thank you.”
“Memoir as community and not just the words of one. You speak fo rthe many who desire to do good in the world. You are the Pablo of the other sex. You are the woman of the sea aware that the land has taught us the forgetting of how to love – which is the essence of how to live.”
– Ethelbert Miller, writer, scholar, and literary activist
On “Ruth’s Skirts” (Icon, 2007)
“The preface to Ruth’s Skirts reads like a polite manifesto, a call-to-arms where the weapons are poems: ‘I’ve learned that the poem is the action and the action is the poem.’ The creation of art is a political statement in and of itself, but Kathy Engel goes further. She rolls up her sleeves and gets down to work.”