My dad—like most fathers in the blue-collar neighborhood where I grew up—was a steelworker. I remember his steel-toed boots. His references to working on the 52-inch floor, hot strip finishing. The casual ways in which he talked about the blast furnace and pouring slag.

That world was the spark that ignited my initial interest in Aimee Noel’s debut poetry book, Slag. However, I quickly realized that Slag is much more than a book about steel mills or about the derogatory word for “slag,” which Noel references in her book’s epigraph as slang for “an offensive term for a woman used to insinuate she is lewd or promiscuous.”  

Rather, Noel expands from a child’s innocent point-of-view to more mature, critical explorations of her surroundings—the idea of leaving the place where you grew up and returning as a stranger—attempting to reconcile the aftermath of tragedies—the way the world views people who stray from accepted (and, thus, acceptable) norms—and the urgent necessity of remembering, honoring, and heeding the past.

Noel’s collection contains four sections, beginning with a youthful narrator whose need for her father’s approval compels her to embrace his world of steel and junkyard cars and barrooms. It is an environment that would have welcomed a boy—a son—but only reluctantly allows her entry. Still, in “Understanding Gear Ratios”:

(b)ecause everything my father valued was shiny, I tried
to wrap myself in chrome or fire myself crucible-hot,
pour slag from my throat until he believed I was
tempered steel and a son.

She succeeds in forging that identity but at what cost? As her awareness grows, she realizes that others have paid a price for trying to be what they are not, as with “How to Get to the Town Park All by Yourself”:

You can go left, but you’ll dead-end
at Ann’s yellow house. She knows your mom
and will let you cut through if her husband
isn’t dressed in women’s clothes right then.

Your mom wonders
if Ann’s still happy
she married Mark
and if she feels cheated on—
but a different kind of cheating.

You wonder
what his leg hair feels like
caught under pantyhose.

It will be a long time
before anyone wonders
how Mark feels.

“Mark’s” private life foreshadows other complexities and dangers. In “The Shores of Everywhere,” Noel’s narrator links environmental contamination, political recklessness, and unjustified personal guilt:

For decades money pumped toxins into clean bodies
of water then walked away. This water swallowed the spoils
as if its job were to keep the secrets of men. Waves wore

sun-glinted jewels on the surface as a distraction, and we did
our part. We accepted blame for our melancholy and stillbirths
and for land which no longer sustained life.

She concludes that

This is not news to you. Your eyes are on a gathering storm
that will churn layers of hubris to the surface, with clouds
ready to set loose rains until a swift current
washes away any trace of power protecting itself.

As the narrator’s knowledge evolves, she turns to history for deeper understanding. In delving into the past—the second section of poems—Noel leans into steelworkers’ perspectives, including those whose health is compromised by prolonged exposure to steel particles. In the poem “dust” she notes that dust:

…settled in coffee
filtered past nose hairs
clambered up laces
stowed away in tool bags
smoothed in grooves of boot tread
coated insides of wedding bands
clung to crib sheets
hung out to dry
in a mill town
did not exist

Clearly, steelworkers exposed their families to particles that they unintentionally brought into their homes. But dangerous as those health issues could be, other factors also loomed large, including the possibility of accidental deaths. From the Youngstown Historical Center of Labor and Industry, we learn a stark truth in the poem “Subpono”:

Should a worker’s body be unrecoverable following an accident,
the company would sometimes present a 140 lb slab of steel or
iron to the family so that they may have something to bury.

Compounding the horrific idea of a person’s “unrecoverable” body after an accident are complications when workers died during the winter. In those instances, freezing temperatures could result in a “Delayed Internment”:

It’s April before we can bury our dead.
The ground refuses our immediate grief,
so we preserve it like summer perch

and guard our memories against premature thaw.
This city is harsh like that, makes you sit
with your ghosts.

Noel’s narrator does sit with ghosts. As she pauses with those wraiths, she enters a darker place in the third section of Slag. 

In an online poetry reading hosted by her publisher, Noel notes that this section looks at “what the world is handling and how you love a world—its dangers and its poisons—but you still love it and hold both things in your hands.”

Although today’s “dangers” and “poisons” often seem to be more than any one person can handle, Noel urges the reader to lean into connections to others as a way to endure overwhelming grief. In “All Together Now”—her poem about the aftermath of a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, in August 2019—she draws attention to the “street-scrubbers from last night.” The “crush of people/facing the vigil’s stage.” The “(c)andles doled out/from grocery bags.” Details she includes are and have been (and, likely, will continue to be) repeated in other towns and cities across America, but Noel offers a measure of solace at the end of the poem:

…you will drape
yourself over a stranger because in passing him
you recognize your own ashes. And if you have
woven your bodies just right, both of his arms
under yours, you will let your knees soften.
If he pulls you closer, if you trust his ability
to hold your grief, if your cheek meets the soft part
of his chest, you will cry, open-mouthed,
stopping the flow of the crowd.

Sometimes strangers commit vile acts of violence, but strangers also can be saviors. Healers. Providers of comfort and love. It is a true—if uneasy—paradox. Equally true might be healing through forgiveness, which Noel explores in “Forgive Us Our Trespasses,” which repeats “as we forgive those who trespass against us” in a prayerful mantra.

That quiet, mournful poem ushers us into the fourth and final section of the book.

Once again, the youthful narrator from the beginning returns; however, she is older now and must grapple with knowledge that cannot be forgotten. What is known cannot become unknown. What is seen cannot be unseen. What is felt cannot be unfelt.

With all of that comes the idea of generational trauma, which insinuates itself throughout this section.

“Hereditary Border” follows red deer that “fed on their mother’s mother’s memory of fear” and never cross into areas that once held electric fences.

“Luxury of Snow” triggers the poet’s muscle memory as she waits out a snow storm but remembers her mother having to drive through “snow blindness” on “slick roads” and with other drivers sharing in her desperation with an unspoken “pledge to keep moving forward/for those behind and ahead.”

“Body of Work” sees the narrator acknowledging that she “come(s) from a long line/of not wanting”—especially of women “not wanting” their babies. Her mother returned “for her high school exams,” shuffled to the back of the class with her belly tucked under a card table and never to have another child. Her grandmother who

threatened to throw herself
over Niagara Falls rather than
let a baby catch its breath
outside of her…

This, she says, “is what/I came from…”

At the very end of this beautiful, bold, poignant, memorable book, Aimee Noel—who twice received the Ohio Art Council’s Individual Excellence Award for poetry, was an OAC Fellow at the Fine Arts Works Center, is an educator and advocate for food access, and now lives with her wife in Dayton, Ohio—balances past actions against today’s consequences by offering her measure of hope in “Inverted Water”:

I choose to believe the world can magically
right itself. Can bring the warmth
back to the surface where it belongs.

Aimee Noel website:  https://www.aimeenoel.net/; cover design: KaiserDicken; cover top photo: Getty Images/iStock Photo; cover bottom photo: Craig Dicken; author photo: Carrie Scarff

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