(At) Wrist

The poems that comprise Tacey M. Atsitty's (At) Wrist are tethered together by a palpable sense of intimacy, risk, and exposure. The cover image by artist Cara Romero sets the stage with its riff on the iconic photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono by Annie Leibovitz. Romero's 2013 photograph, entitled Two Virgins, also depicts a woman entangled in a man's embrace. Yet through its Indigenous themes, the image now strikes a startling contrast between the two figures: the woman is fully dressed while he, clad only in a loin cloth, wears the head of a buffalo. With his face and body turned toward her, he wraps his leg around her stomach. He holds her face in one of his hands, which seems to dwarf her skull. His other hand clutches a tuft of her hair. Lying on her back with her gaze turned slightly toward him, the woman pets the nose rim of the buffalo head. Is he an amalgamation of both man and beast? Is her posture one of consent, entrapment, or both? How are we to understand her pensive surrender alongside his feral insatiability?Louise Erdrich's mandate to love, which appears as an epigraph at the beginning of the text, helps to consider the stakes of the relation depicted in the image, if not Atsitty's entire volume: “You have to love,” Erdrich writes, “You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up” (vi). Guided by the cover image and Erdrich's directive, readers are primed to meditate on the subtle flirtations, entanglements, and overlaps between such themes of love and danger, mind and body, and between humanity, animality, and nature that structure and animate Atsitty's collection. Through these themes, the poems push researchers and students alike to wrestle with and perhaps rethink presumed categorical distinctions that inform Western epistemologies.Atsitty infuses her collection with elements from both her Mormon faith and her Diné, or Navajo, cultural heritage. Christian themes appear, for instance, in “Querido Apu,” where the poet references imagery of the crucifixion (14), and in “Last Night, Bleeding,” a work that evokes the biblical story of Jesus's encounter with a woman who suffers from chronic hemorrhaging (20; Luke 8:43–48). And yet, Atsitty's more compelling writing is found in her appeals to nature to describe embodied and relational dynamics. These descriptions, no doubt indicative of the poet's fluency in Indigenous ways of knowing, do more than employ nature as a linguistic device. In Atsitty's verse, human bodies are not merely like nature; they are of nature. They are co-constitutive with it. In “Chafe,” she posits an interconnection and similarity between her own embodied qualities and that of a cornstalk: “For someone husky, like me, it's grained at the inner thighs” (11). There is a shared loosening of the body/plant over time. The use of an undifferentiated “we” marks a mutual transition from “once depending alone on rain, once sprouting silken, firm—closer we are to being round—until turns of girdling” (11). The poem concludes with the decomposition of organic material into soil, where a “thin weave” that is seemingly comprised of human and plant elements is exposed: “legs—skin—leaf—limb—” (11).This kind of embodied intermingling is also reflected in “Of Ribbon.” The poem is the ground where humans and nature meet and where the boundary between the speaker and her presumed lover becomes indecipherable. Atsitty apprehends nature and her lover not through distant, differentiated examination but by sensing them from within herself. Her return to a mountain is described as a traversal “between my feet, up my legs, into my body” (37). She describes the knowledge of her lover even more viscerally in a passage that warrants extended citation: I've felt grass sway inside melike strands of ribbonalong his ribs. I've seenhim weave his wayinto manhood. I knowthe shapes his palms make,ankles and teeth. They slidethen lock into me like ropeburn, fused to each petalor wing or ripple. (37)Atsitty's work attests to how knowledge and apprehension are gleaned not solely through the mind, but through bodily engagement and encounter. The collection is thus an especially insightful reference for scholars who seek to consider the significance of affect, the erotic, and the senses. Moreover, the shapeshifting frequently enacted in the poems between the speaker and other human and natural life forms would be fruitful for teachers looking to creatively engage students around mythology, the speculative, and philosophical distinctions between self and other.(At) Wrist requires slow and committed engagement. Atsitty weaves her poems together in ways that speak to and back to one another; tracking this ebb and flow of exchange is both painstaking and illuminating. Those seeking extended attention to overtly religious themes may find the collection wanting. And yet, readers who approach this text with a preoccupation with the conventionally religious may miss the sense of mysticism embedded in the work and the deep engagement it demands. In Atsitty's verse, relation—between plants, animals, and other humans alike—is a form of ritual; careful reading (and rereading) becomes something of a rite, an intentional practice. As such, (At) Wrist is a work that prompts readers to generatively consider the sacred dimensions of poetry and other creative forms of cultural production in ways that extend the epistemological parameters of what religion is and where it can be found.