Inventories

A Buyer’s Guide to the Afterlife, the new poetry collection from Knoxville writer Erica Wright, chronicles the restless search for orientation in a world that seems unmoored, at once half-familiar and utterly foreign. These poems foreground intimate personal concerns, but at every turn, they insist on a wider frame of reference, depicting glimpses of wildness, menace, ingenuity, or awe.

A longtime Chapter 16 contributor, Wright has built a versatile body of work, including poetry, mystery novels, and nonfiction. Her previous poetry collection, All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned, was published in 2017. This year, Wright has two new books: Buyer’s Guide and the mystery novel The Museum of Unusual Occurrence. Her previous novel, Hollow Bones, shares some thematic subject matter with her 2020 essay collection, Snake. In that book, Wright takes on the cultural legacy of vilifying snakes and her own personal fear of them, eventually creating a space to explore her fascination with them, rather than giving into her fear.

Animals of all kinds populate the poems of Buyer’s Guide. They lurk at the perimeters. They swoop in from overhead. They stare back into the gleam of headlights. They scuffle and cry somewhere out in the dark. Poems with titles like “The Caterpillars,” “The Possums,” “Prelude to a Wolf,” and “God Sends a Spider in the Storm” contribute to the sense that the animal world bears teeming witness to the lives of the humans whose choices constantly endanger them. 

The essential wildness of animals presents the human world with startling flashes of challenge and insight into our own natures. In a poem called “Too Many Animal Stories,” the speaker tries to dislodge hazardous chicken bones from her dog’s mouth and exposes a revealing contrast: “Sometimes the incisors scrape my skin, and she never // apologizes for her nature. I apologize for mine / all the time.”

The speaker of “Unlikely Mammal” watches the twilight arrival of bats (with their “staccato grace”) and reflects on the disorienting pain of vestibular migraines. “Sentient” pairs a pit viper’s dangerous bite with the harvesting of its venom to mix the antivenom that reverses the danger. The speaker acknowledges the perils of trekking into nature, “worried about the weather // and the animals and the future / here on Earth, but admiring // the lot of it, too.”

“Year of the Fox” evokes the vulnerable wiliness of foxes as an emblem of the speaker’s uncertainty about how to teach her child to navigate the fallibility and finiteness of life. This particular inner conflict hits at the collection’s spiritual and emotional center.

Though these poems are lyric in form, they do proceed along a loosely drawn narrative arc. Buyer’s Guide chronicles a woman’s life passing through a series of thresholds — pregnancy loss, a healthy but nerve-wracking pregnancy, and early scenes of motherhood. A series of “Inventory” poems trace three years of turbulent change, both personal and collective.

Against a backdrop of global pandemic and escalations of national division and violence, this new mother longs for a deeper kind of trust in the world. Facing contagion, rising floodwaters, and physical illnesses, she considers various ways to arrange her understanding and her memories. In several poems, she erects metaphors of museums and fictional cityscapes for this purpose. But this book’s spiritual center of gravity doesn’t seem to trust these attempts to organize our messy existence.

The speaker of “Permanent Address” considers mortality and the afterlife while praying her in-utero child can embrace life in all its chaos and beauty. Wright captures this longing in an unforgettable image:

            And I hope he likes the sound of bees
 using their bodies to make a future

right here on earth with its fires,
            yes, but also the morning air
through a window that opened in the night.

Wright is adept at infusing reflections on mortality and faith with imagery from the natural world. In “On Your Mark,” the speaker recounts a complex moment of distracting her young son from the nearby burial of a cat, but she ignites this scene with a walloping side note: “For my birthday, I pay for a hawk to land / on my outstretched arm, take my bloody offering. // For a moment, I can see the end / beyond endings, invent a new way // of doing business with death.”

For all the grace and clarity on the surface of these poems, A Buyer’s Guide to the Afterlife thrums with a restless urge to identify forms and images through which we can understand our lives. We try, endlessly, to make ordered sense of our human predicament.

But as the book’s titular poem conveys, the natural world will always undo these illusions. The speaker describes a tense drive through an electrical storm. “We hold our arms, hair rising / the closer we get to our home,” she says. “We know the storm will pass, / but never the pressure.”