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Few first poetry collections dazzle with the freshness, lyrical alacrity, and tender surprise found in Emily Pittnos\u2019s debut collection, The Last Unkillable Thing<\/em>, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize. At its center is the tragic, untimely death of the speaker\u2019s father, with many of the poems asking how one can bear to live in the world after such loss. And while the imagery of death and the natural world forms the foundation of this collection, the poems are never afraid to venture onward, pushing past the immediate shock of grief and into the world in which one must continue. These poems ask questions a less intrepid poet might avoid. The result is dark and stunning\u2014raw, yet crafted with undeniable guile.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n At the heart of the collection\u2019s opening poem, \u201cAssuming, once again, it\u2019s done with,\u201d lie the lines \u201cA lapse in grief \/ is another emptiness; a space, in turn, filled by the usual remembering.\u201d This emptiness is the space in which The Last Unkillable Thing<\/em> stakes out its territory, as if to say I knew to expect grief\u2014but what comes afterward?<\/em> The poem continues, \u201cthe unthinkable \/ made so possible as to become fact\u2014he vanished \/ and she went on,<\/em>\u201d which is a dynamic that drives the poems without constraining them. What might it mean to interrogate the self in the face of all-consuming grief?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Yet, while the poems focus on tragedy, they still find ways to push against the establishment of genre, experimenting with punctuation, white space, the line, the sequence, the function of form. A series of poems, each titled \u201cAfter,\u201d alternates between fragments caught in justified blocks and gorgeous, italicized long lines. Other poems, such as \u201cWith Key in the Door,\u201d use the colon as an associative tool, as in the lines \u201cIt is impossible to quit: \/ forecasting an alternate life : hazy glow in which : \/ I am brighter : kinder : unorphanable.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As the different modes of language in The Last Unkillable Thing<\/em> coalesce, a rich, complex interiority begins to emerge. Death may have been the catalyst for this collection, but the speaker allows her interrogations to venture beyond guilt, forgiveness, vulnerability, longing, and desire. Often, the speaker implicates herself by speaking through the lens of an animal. In this vein, \u201cStudy of a Lone Beast\u201d oscillates between the fear of further loss and the precarious act of weaving a spider\u2019s web, opening with the stanza \u201cThe false widow builds her web \/ in a chasm\u2014the grace of risk, \/ her passage of silk an act \/ of survival,\u201d a set of lines which holds the simultaneous beauty and danger of living clearly in front of the reader\u2019s eye. The poem ends in a similarly haunting stanza:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Suppose the worst does happen\u2014<\/p>\n by sunrise the web wrecked, glittering<\/p>\n With snowfall, and where has she gone<\/p>\n the queen of this realm?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There\u2019s an unmistakable beauty in the destruction of the image, the spider\u2019s home destroyed by glittering snow, the false widow implicated in disaster she couldn\u2019t possibly have stopped. The line \u201cSuppose the worst does happen\u201d has haunted me since I first encountered it in this poem, though more haunting still are the moments where The Last Unkillable Thing\u00a0<\/em>accepts that the worst one could imagine has<\/em> happened, and that the world has unforgivingly kept on.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Pittinos expertly uses the tool of the poetic sequence to ground the poems in this collection, holding the pieces together with bonds more powerful than mere similarities in subject. Halfway through the collection, \u201cShe Must Have Been a Bit Green to Look At\u201d follows the speaker as \u201cShe steps into the wool of midnight,\u201d into isolation, where she can confront the burdensome beast of grief that lurks in the shadows of the collection, reckoning with both \u201cthe menagerie inside her\u201d and \u201cthe colorless ghost \/ at her bedside by morning.\u201d Despite its length, this sequence constantly reinvents itself, taking ever-shifting angles of approach to its subject matter. \u201cIn the night hall she rises, razes \/ a vase to the floor,\u201d begins one section, painting a portrait of the speaker\u2019s psyche with the dichotomy of day. \u201cIn the morning: mice \/ casually rinsing \/ their puny hands in a puddle. \/\/ Even they<\/em>, she thinks, cower not from me<\/em>,\u201d the section ends.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Another long sequence titled \u201cSubnivean (or Holding Back the Year<\/em>),\u201d which is approximately the same length, serves to build the world of The Last Unkillable Thing<\/em> in much the same way, though this poem thrusts us directly into the first-person perspective of the speaker, opening with \u201cI expected the snow, but waking stuns. \/ A world of storm struck white\u2014distance \/ collapsed by an absence of shadow,\u201d taking in an expanse that opens endlessly outward, enveloping the speaker in the low light of loss. Here, the language is as striking as the content is shockingly honest, as the sections are unafraid to name what troubles them. One section reads:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019d be lost<\/p>\n without my own bright footpath: tilled snow:<\/p>\n cloud cover: moonglow refracted: the shotgun crack<\/p>\n of a bough unburdened.<\/p>\n Could I walk off the hours<\/p>\n I\u2019ve spent ashamed, attempting a life<\/p>\n that would make the dead proud?<\/p>\n What would it look like,<\/p>\n how much would it weigh?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The section shifts boldly from the image of bent moonlight to the violent roar of a shotgun into the interior. Beyond its lushness and deft command of language, these poems, particularly the sequence poems, show the reader how the speaker sees the world\u2014one in which cloud cover might lead to shame, in which tilled snow might represent a good life.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Even with its consistency and generous worldbuilding, The Last Unkillable Thing<\/em> leaves room for discovery and surprise, as in the reluctant eroticism of \u201cI Grow Less Visible\u201d (\u201cA silhouette can sway \/ a person\u2014the woman releasing \/ her bra behind scrim. My breath more alive \/ than when held in) or the violent embrace of \u201cIt Is Not Animal to Forgive\u201d (\u201cA man dresses a deer\u2014quick split, blood \/ guttered by rainfall\u2014before pressing a woman \/ to his own soft belly). Here, the emptiness of a snow-covered field belongs just as much as the possibility of \u201cthe touch of joy,\u201d found, perhaps, in \u201cthe belly of a bridegroom\u201d or \u201cthe oyster \/ even without pearl,\u201d adding to an overall sense of fullness that gives the collection its depth.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There is an ever-present danger lurking on the outskirts of this collection, as \u201cNightjars bed down in snow\u201d or the eye of the poem passes over \u201cthe wood duck, displaced, alone in a shadow.\u201d Much like the poems in this marvelous first book, human experience is endlessly complex, surprising, and unexpected, as the myriad compelling images and emotionally striking landscapes in this collection so seamlessly portray. There\u2019s a real vulnerability in The Last Unkillable Thing<\/em> that gives way to so much more, almost as if to say to be human is to grieve<\/em>. And while the poems themselves are unafraid to behold beauty, they never lose sight of the pain that lingers beneath them. After all, Pittinos tells us, \u201cDoesn\u2019t it hurt \/ to be human. I\u2019m so human I could die.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A marvelous first book. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":6677,"template":"","categories":[9,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6675","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-book-review"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n