“How do its legs, / bent reversed, move ahead?” This line, midway through the poem “(R)egret,” hints at a central question in Danusha Laméris’ Blade by Blade, a collection of verse that is seared by  grief and loss but forges out of them radiant art. 

Blade by Blade is Laméris’ third collection. Her first, The Moons of August was chosen by Naomi Shihab  Nye as 2014 winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. Bonfire Opera, her second, came from  University of Pittsburgh Press in 2020 and won the Northern California Book Award. Laméris is a  former poet laureate of Santa Cruz, California and serves on the faculty of Pacific University’s low residency MFA program. 

So how does one go on when the past presses in with such relentless insistence? A child buried. A  brother lost to suicide. A lover, a mother: gone and gone. 

“I didn’t hate it, the ruins,” the poet says in “Construction.” Later in that poem, she continues with:

That’s aftermath for you. The way we keep on drinking
out of little paper cups, walking through disaster
in our brand-new shoes for everyone who can’t.

Poet Dorianne Laux has been an influence on Laméris nearly from the start. “The Moons of August,” title poem of her debut collection, is after one of Laux’s. And now, two books on, Blade by Blade’s epigraph is sourced from Laux—from the poem “What’s Broken.” Indeed, Laméris is something of a self proclaimed connoisseur of the broken. She has spoken about the topic in interviews, taught  workshops on the “broken poem,” and written about its beauty in her Substack “Fleeting  Temples”—“What if we thought things should be broken? That brokenness reveals the sacredness at  the center—or, at least, the mystery.” 

Broken or not, the soft swirl of language is never far with its offer of respite and joy. From “Fire Season”:

revved and ready to head north
up Highway 1, past the rough
surf and golden cliffs, past
small towns held together
by roadside restaurants serving up
burgers and artichoke bisque,
the pelicans hanging low
on the late-day wind
above the corrugated line
of the horizon.

As in any good story, there must be a foil. The other side of these flourishes of awe appears in the  form of lines as plain as they are direct. In the painfully honest “For the Record,” for example, we’re  first served, the “scrawled script with oversized, looped g’s.” of the lost brother. But later, “The dead are helpless.” Such bald statements are like a road straightening again after the curve—a post volta reckoning, if not volta itself.  

These poems were born on/of the California coast: “I have wanted to live / in this paradise forever,” from “Fire Season.” We’re introduced to the collection through the piece “Barefoot” – a romp among images  of a shoeless childhood where experience is gathered tactilely and laced with things like “the squidge  of moss” and “crusted bulbs of kelp.” 

In “Slither,” from which comes the book’s title phrase, a girl of the creek, once a companion to snakes and lizards, is an adult now and is startled by a frog. The poet’s conclusion about the event makes sure we see clearly the stakes: “It was then I knew I’d become a stranger to the world.”  

The struggle is real, but, judging by the rest of the book, the battle isn’t lost. 

“Leg,” one of the longer pieces in the collection and among the highlights, not only realigns us with  nature but invites us on a walk of discovery. The speaker and a friend find a deer leg gnawed by a  mountain lion. Slowly, each character in the poem is granted the title of “sister” and wrapped in the same circle of kin.

…And I don’t know
what a sister is if not an other, a fragile mirror, space
of tenderness. Female, and mortal, and afraid.

Under this umbrella, she rounds up the friend, the friend’s dog, the narrator’s sister-in-law, and, ultimately, the hunted doe and the hunter herself (a mountain lion).

And when I eye, again, the doe’s skinned leg

lying in the loam, I think, for a moment, Sister
of the scrap that’s left.

But it’s only later, lying awake in the dark,
that I picture the tawny shadow
skimming the hillside, hidden by a clump of trees.
Sister, I think, of the lion that ate her.

As it would have to in a book of poems so rich in the natural world, the climate crisis lives here as  well, not as something greater or lesser than the personal losses, but as a companion. 

Laméris is the consummate storyteller who draws us close with hesitation and implication. “I’m not sure I want to tell you this,” in “The Sound.” “You know. You were there,” in “To Break.” Haunting masterpieces like “Blue Note” in which we’re charmed by the memory of a brother naming his house plants then told that he has been lost with “the sound absence makes,” or “Daughter” where we look into a beautifully surreal world, lend the book an ache that’s addictive. For example

Daughter, I say, and I mean a list
of what-ifs, a cacophony of sorrows.

I imagine her tall, lithe as willows.
When I say Daughter,

I mean a match, ready to strike herself
against the world that isn’t

this one. I mean luck. I mean a river
empty of drowning…

Laméris’ poems are a smooth soothe, despite thorny contexts. In many ways, this newest book is  exactly the maturation we would hope for in an already accomplished poet. If we return to themes  from the first two books, it’s because, with the aggregate of time and craft, fearlessness has  deepened, and lessons demonstrated through language are resplendent with new surprises.  

The poems whisper—not that everything will be okay—but that they’ll be with you through it. With  grace and beauty, padded here and there by innocence and ignorance, we move on. Evident as well  is the hope for compassion for those left trying to make sense of a broken world, trying, in fact, to  praise it and find it holy.  The beauty rendered on the page is worth what you have to risk. Blade by Blade ensures that when  our hearts break, they’ll be as full as they come.

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