![\"Anything](\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/34\/2021\/08\/8323A3A4-DCFF-4623-9509-D94EA8B83CF1-200x300.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nPress 53, 2021<\/p>\n
Paperback, 64 pages, $17.95<\/p>\n
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I feel tape break against my chest<\/p>\n
But there is no finish line, no<\/p>\n
Not knowing. When can I say,<\/p>\n
It\u2019s better now? <\/em>It\u2019s taken years<\/p>\n <\/p>\n At the age of twenty, Cheryl Wilder \u201cwon the toss \/\/ of the keys \/ and rounded the corners \/\/ slid through the stop signs \/ then awoke in the car \/\/ the only one able \/ to choke silence into words.\u201d She was physically whole. Four months later, her passenger woke up from a coma with a life-changing brain injury.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Starkness pervades Wilder\u2019s collection Anything That Happens<\/em>, a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection by Press 53\u2019s poetry series editor. Each succinct word clanks in the echo of a tragic mistake. Wilder doesn\u2019t hide behind poetic devices that can make trauma beautiful or romantic or at least palatable. Instead, when writing about the accident and its aftermath, Wilder\u2019s choice is often sparse language with anaphoric qualities\u2014titles like \u201cSlipped I,\u201d \u201cSlipped II,\u201d \u201cSlipped III\u201d\u2014running through the collection haunting our subconscious. The lines, \u201cI am taken\u201d are sporadically and strategically placed\u2014taken aback, taken to jail, taken by surprise that anything <\/em>has actually happened.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The emotion is mature, unguarded, and adept, as though Wilder has written these poems for decades, while she learned how to live as two people, \u201cthe before and the after; one I\u2019ve already forgotten \/ the other I have not met.\u201d She never pleas for our pity or understanding.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Wilder flexes her craft muscles in language addressing her childhood, marriage, and motherhood: \u201cMy father reared me \/ unbridled . . . I plant phlox, milkweed, coneflower, drag my suckling \/\/ childhood into the nearest cave \/ and lick the wounds of generations.\u201d Later in \u201cFamily Tree Potluck,<\/em>\u201d she recalls, \u201cmy father doesn\u2019t speak . . . Word shards in potato salad. I was reared on unspoken.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Mighty line breaks and sentence structure create a duality that magnifies meaning and the weight of veracity: \u201cI didn\u2019t understand anything \/\/ had just happened.\u201d Wilder uses the mid-sentence stanza break so the reader feels all of the ways this can be read. In another poem, Wilder writes, \u201cI wanted to run. I had to get help.\u201d The choice to place the truncated sentences on one line causes the reader to absorb the two robust and clashing emotions at once, thereby recreating the speaker’s overwhelming experience.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,<\/em> Adrienne Rich writes, \u201cTruthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity.\u201d The complexity and fecundity of poetry often comes from the unconscious struggling to fulfill its desire for truth. In the absence of truth, there is a distance between two people and only truth spans this struggle. This possibility between two people is the power we witness in this collection\u2014Wilder before and after the accident, the poet and the reader, the reader before and after their own anything happens<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Wilder grapples with honesty throughout the pages. \u201cIt hurts. To stand outside \/\/ a wrecked car, to remain on that street \/ year after year, to not want the truth.\u201d\u00a0She duels with candor: \u201cI try to switch places \/\u2026but I won the toss.” She discloses with vulnerability: “I wanted to escape \/ with the mountain man who told me \/ I, too, could live with a warrant.\u201d Wilder\u2019s direct and concise approach continues throughout this text, beginning another poem with \u201cYou cannot trust me.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n She does this work unflinchingly and establishes a path for us to follow. Anything That Happens<\/em> is Cheryl Wilder\u2019s salve to the willing reader\u2019s wounded psyche.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mature, unguarded, and adept.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":6462,"template":"","categories":[9,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6460","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-book-review"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n