In her new book, The Alphabet Not Unlike the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012), Katrina Vandenberg uses the written word as a lens for viewing loss and the people and events affected by it, letting the poems radiate out from there. Her husband and her sister are common characters, as are the men and women they loved in the past. Vandenberg looks directly at the mistakes of her loved ones, but without judgement, and finds them more beautiful for their faults.

In one of the most bare and lovely poems in the collection, “Making Her Black Bean Chili Again,” Vandenberg writes, “Because a marriage has got to feed its ghosts, or they’ll never let you be.” She continues:

I hear his was five feet tall like me, but strong enough to stand her ground
on a hiking trail spraying bear bomb at a mother grizzly as she charged.

Clearly a woman you should listen to. So I keep making it the way she does.

The love poems in the book are set in the places love doesn’t like to go to or talk about, including prisons. “My Sister Visits Her Ex in Prison Once a Year to Ask Him Whether He Did It” begins this way:

She goes alone, tells no one she is going, always
the night before Easter, when the altar
is stripped, black veil draped over the cross.

The love here is layered and complex. The love the speaker’s sister once felt for her imprisoned ex demands that she keep going back; the love the speaker of the poem has for her sister prevents her from asking her sister why she goes. In “Abyss,” even Vandenberg asks, “If a good love poem requires a little darkness, / how far down can I go?”

Despite the love in these poems there is a pervading sense of loss in all its forms. “Losing it / would make me bleed,” she writes in “Virginity,” though the line could describe any moment in almost any of these poems. For instance, in “Prologue: A Ghazal” she writes, “o scarlet letter A // for spontaneous abortion, the early miscarriage’s true name.” The end of “Poem on Tim’s Thirty-Fifth Birthday (July 28, 1969-November 20, 1994)” goes like this:

You must be on my paper clips, this page,

my thank-you notes. You must be in my mouth

and in my blood. In that way, nothing’s changed:

I’m losing you. Even the box of this poem

won’t be enough.

Indeed, the loss in these poems makes the love that much more urgent.

Vandenberg is at her most successful when she starts with a simple beginning—a fact, perhaps, or a memory—and lets the poem spiral out to encompass a little of everything, as in “E,” one of the best poems in the book. She begins by informing us that, “Once, a man with his arms raised to the sky was part / of the alphabet[,]” referencing an Egyptian hieroglyph. From there, we encounter Saint Fiacre and an inmate in Jackson, Michigan—both gardeners, she tells us—house flies, tomatoes, and mathematical symbols. “Why am I telling you?” Vandenberg asks;

Because there are large spaces between the

things I understand.

 

I think that people are not evil, but are afraid.

.
I think you want to raise your arms to the sky.

Not only does the poem echo within itself, but many of the characters and themes ripple through other poems, many of which make up the core of the collection, each poem revealing more information and new discoveries.

The Alphabet Not Unlike the World is sparse and open, making reading it easy and even quick. But the joy in a book like this is letting oneself sink into those spaces and get inside the poems. Vandenberg’s loss allows the reader inside to find things, though perhaps not what was being looked for. The poems here are bittersweet and love filled, but rarely in the way you expect, so spending time with them is surprising and fulfilling.

What books will you be spending time with as the year winds down?