My guys, it turns out I can no longer read anything about the U.S. military without my mind skipping over and waving around the blood-drenched flags of coloniality and class-based mortality and morbidity, as lower-income Americans are funnelled toward our brutal military, trying desperately to find a space where they might somehow make it, even if that space might come with blood.
Amanda Newell’s I Will Pass Even to Acheron, published by Rattle, is a strange, unnerving piece. Ostensibly it follows Newell’s former student Adam and his slow recovery post-IED explosion while he was deployed, likely in the Middle East. (Did she say? It’s quite likely: my brain may well have stuttered over it as I obsessed over other things.) I wonder, as I reread passages, if this discomfort is part of the cycle’s poetic DNA.
In the poem “Recommendation” Newell writes that her former student “wanted to see the crimson / clash of war. So I wrote // a letter recommending him / without reservation.” I spent a long time pondering those sentences in my first read, and I am pondering them again now, trying to suss out if this was a letter of recommendation to the Marines (is that even a thing? Once I recommended someone without reservation…for a McNair fellowship) and what it means, ethically, to write such a thing. Its layers feel to me as complex and thick as wildfire smoke.
I Will Pass Even to Acheron is difficult poetry, brutal and tender, a reminder of the very human costs of war waged somewhere far away. In some ways it is particularly interesting right now, given its slow build to the eventual amputation of Newell’s former student’s foot: as Ukrainians fight for their country and their lives, they face levels of amputations unprecedented since World War I. But theirs is a very different war than that of which Newell writes, for they did not go forth seeking out war: it came to their doorsteps, dropping death from above.
I Will Pass Even to Acheron is, I think, important poetry. It will make its reader think about the lives of those who survive war, regardless of the “side” on which they stand; it will drive home the horrors carried home. But, for readers like me and so many others, it will also bring up questions of ethics, will drive home matters of religiosity that often go by the wayside. And, always, it will humanize carnage.
Essentially a Nerd 