“I like to imagine when horses were unremarkable / as Toyotas. When you wouldn’t turn to your companion / after spotting them in a field and say ‘horses’.” Laura Cresté effortlessly places us inside her debut full-length collection, In The Good Years, with these three lines from her opening poem, “Dead Horses.” The speaker then switches to speaking of the deeds of her ancestors on horsebacks, long gone. This opening dreamscape feels like a seamless entry point into the book, preparing us for the speaker’s vexed relationship with her lineage, the ongoing political violence, the natural world she encounters through the portal of her garden, and the constant, unrelenting threats to survival—whether those involve surviving the present epoch or reckoning with an ancestor’s plight in a detention center.

Opening the collection with what was once prevalent and now scarce seems to be in tandem with the poet’s hyperawareness of time. Whether it be recalling that passengers once clapped when airplanes were still new, or conjecturing that polar bears will soon usurp the position of dinosaurs in history books, Cresté is attempting to pin down that multifaceted emotion experienced when one must accept that the baton of existence (albeit of one’s own species) must be relayed onward from one genus to another, while also unearthing the violence committed against one’s own, and nevertheless maintaining a sincere desire to carry on. 

In “Radius”, she speculates how her long deceased grandparents might have become: 

skeletons in Sunday dress, hand bones emerging
from suit coat like spokes of a broken umbrella.

In time, the interior of body meets the interior of earth.

Later, in the same poem, the speaker’s bones transform into objects that she carries to Paris. She writes, “I took my bones to Paris…,” as if they were separate objects in their own right. In “Poem For My Children Born During the Sixth Extinction,” she writes: 

When they’re older I’ll want them to believe their bones
will lie dumb in the earth forever. This is your one life.

Cresté’s poems examine both the inward and the outward as she views the Anthropocene through the lens of lineage and complicity, while deftly creating a universe within which her readers are granted a sense of being made privy to her most intimate, yet often relatable thoughts as they progress through the book. In “Self-Portraits”, the speaker offers up a two-line vignette: “Sometimes allowing sex I didn’t want, / I was historical.” Earlier, in “Dead Horses”, when speaking of how her great-grandmother was just a thirteen-year-old child bride, devoid of agency, the speaker clarifies: “But I wouldn’t wish it undone. / I want to get born.” Within the same poem, we move from a teenage ancestor to the teenage self: “I was a teenager and jealous of the freedom / I imagined belonged to the thin. / Now I know no one feels free.” 

There is also an unwavering strand of womanhood and body image that loops through the book. In “The Mothers,” the speaker describes her mother and maternal aunt as “Thin as models because their mother smoked and would make a single box of spaghetti for dinner.” This stunning poem is also the sole prose poem within the collection, and is a delightful departure from the prevalent stanzaic form, as if to signal to the reader that the speaker would like the women in her lineage to unapologetically take up space. 

Throughout the collection, fear takes root not only in memory but beneath the physical structure of the home itself. In “Inheritance,” sounds induce vigilance in the middle of the night, until the speaker realizes “it’s only the woodchucks annexing / the underdeck.” And in “Sisters,” arrowheads are buried in the yard, mice linger under the desk, and in the cellar below ground level the speaker’s grandfather is found dead. This underscores a persistent tension that moves quietly beneath the poems, suggesting a slow accumulation of unease. The collection contains a multitude of voices across generations and geographies, which all eventually connect back with her own. This allows for the weaving together of an array of themes, each equally central,  from ecological plight, including the threat faced by the whale, to political plight viewed through the lens of the speaker’s relatives. 

The book is divided into four sections, with one entire section devoted to categories of guilt, which uses Karl Jasper’s Holocaust-related theories as a vehicle to speak of the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-83. Within that section is a 15-page poem, “Calle San Cielo,” This long poem, which adopts the title of the poet’s aunt’s book of the same name, incorporates a pastiche of translated fragments of Alicia Creste’s poems in lyric essay fashion. These fragments are then woven together with events retold from the perspective of the speaker’s father and her own ethical conundrum. Here are excerpts from “Calle San Cielo,” in which she writes:

…I fear it’s wrong to animate
the dead—the poem an act of ventriloquism. I don’t want to be lyrical
about the suffering of others.

…

Because my father is not afraid to look at the worst things men have done,
I finally ask him how. What happened to her in the private rooms of the
detention center? On the shuttered main street, deep in the off-season, my
ungloved hand goes numb…

The garden is a silent but traceable motif across the poems. “Gentle or Not” draws ethical stakes into focus. The gardening verb, “to weed,” collides with an image of violence with young “boys blowing pot smoke at a spider.” In “Overripe,” the garden is hostile and intimate at once. It is also unruly and excessive. The speaker does not master this terrain; she negotiates with it, oscillating between intervention and resignation. Slugs find the basil regardless of where it’s planted; chipmunks dig new holes, and the doormat is soiled with batshit. 

The desire “for the garden / to die back a little” is not nihilistic but exhausted: a wish for dormancy, for reprieve. The speaker feels “slightly more animal” once she’s given up birth control (echoing how control is temporary) almost as if her body is returning to the natural order of things. She oscillates between action and surrender—skimming dead newts from the pool before observing that “Mike tends to never-ending tasks, / neatening the yard of fallen twigs, / while I believe in entropy and let it alone.” This contrast is not moralized; instead, it stages a central tension of the collection: whether survival comes from control or from acceptance. 

The collection reads like a negotiation with the self: the poet seems to seek from the self the permission to take on the role of bystander as decay unfolds around her—to pay attention to the minutia of the living, which in other words also means the minutia of the dying. Even the definition of the Anthropocene, which refers to the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity is the dominant influence on climate and environment, suggests a distinct geological time interval, one that will inevitably end. This inevitability is a large backdrop against which trauma, at the genealogical level, is felt and carried. In “Inheritance”, she states: 

I don’t know how to explain
the terror ready to rise up
from the expansive safety of my life

…

It can’t be because soldiers once
dragged my family from their beds.
It can’t be, because my father
had already fled. Fear didn’t
transmit through the genes.

…

…Weeks pass like this,
waiting for something we can’t name.

Moreover, toward the end of the collection in the penultimate poem, “Poem For My Children Born During the Sixth Extinction,” she writes: “we knew our children’s lives would get worse every year. / We thought they might like to be here anyway, / to know oceans, ice cream, optic nerves, the flowers and all their names.” 

In Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit articulates: to make a garden is “to bet on a future in which the roses and trees would bloom for years and the latter would bear fruit in decades to come.” The garden does not promise redemption. It demands time, labor, and the faith within a future that one might not live to witness. Survival, then, is not optimism but a commitment to tending what one can hope will outlast them, to accepting failure as part of care. When thinking of the time, care, and labor that has been poured into each of these poems, the poems themselves might function as wagers. One might think of each poem as a necessary bet that the poet is placing upon a future. Each one is then offered forward to readers of future generations who may be inhabiting their own version of the Anthropocene—a future that may diverge from Cresté’s own, but one that will undoubtedly carry parallel, if not greater burdens.

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