To read Alessandra Lynch’s fifth book of poetry, Wish Ave, released October 2024 by Alice James Books, is to inhabit the shadowlands, to examine the subliminal spaces that lurk just below the surface of this world. We become a voyeur to private conversations and interactions between the Speaker (the author) and two unnamed Voices. In doing so, we find ourselves swept away in an out-of-its-banks slow moving river rich in language and vivid in details.
Lynch’s narrative is wistful, each poem a stolen breath. The Voices help guide us to a different way of seeing. The Speaker casts incantations that wield a sword against the memory floor soft and sad. Here, we are led into a watery dreamland where we float in eddies of alternate universes.
There is a wrestling going on within the covers of this book. There is mention of grief here, but also something more forbidding—something in the nightshade family—a conquering of personal myths followed by transcendence. In essence, a Heroine’s Journey. But first we have to acknowledge the existence of the great wound humankind carries within. The Voices help us distill the truths behind our private losses and anger. We are told that we must invent a new language, a new universe to contain horror.
At times sentences are structured with such an ethereal lightness that they appear as specters on paper; as if, should you turn away, the words themselves might disappear once read. Brought out into the light are the societal rules that hamper our self-realization and the discovery of the many masks we use to camouflage our fragile existence.
Lynch’s lyrical voice had me transfixed. This book is part cautionary fairy tale, part hard-won treasure—each lesson a black pearl brought up by a skilled cliff diver. Hard truths are hard to learn. Among them, the author tells us that the ancestral pull can be fatal. But, hope also runs throughout this book—there are daughters with hands that refuse to go numb.
The author weaves into her narrative the beauty-makers—the poets, composers, and artists that help save the world. Among these are Rimbaud, Roethke, Baudelaire, Lorca, Kandinsky, and Shostakovich. We have an invitation to grab hold of Emily-mind, to enter Sappho’s Hour of Gold. The Speaker asks Where are Chagall’s blue horses? His soft naked people in rose-hip swoon, blurred moon…
Lynch has given us worlds that contain empires of feeling, a yearning to become part of the Great Vanishment. She invites us to listen to the whisperers that surround us in the speckled hours, to awake to our lives, to look up at the stars, those ghosts of knowing. This hauntingly beautiful book is one to be read in bed at 2 am when the rest of the world is sleeping and the hoodlum forest has been hushed, with the wise Voices advising us— It’s best to stay hidden in a drawer of light.
