Christina Olson’s The Last Mastodon is, ostensibly, about fossils: the bones of the dead, the creatures pulled from La Brea and its surrounding lands. The physical markers, as it were, of the land’s past. But instead, The Last Mastodon, published in 2019 by Rattle, is fundamentally about us, and what it means, for good and for ill, to be human.
Olson threads the needle of U.S. history, full and ugly, throughout this collection of poems supposedly about bones. Jefferson is here, and so is Sally Hemings, who, Olson reminds us, could not escape. Lewis and Clark trudge across the plains, looking for mastodons, like Max the Mastodon. Max is here (Olson calls him “The Last Mastodon,” even though, as she writes, “You weren’t, of course”), and so is Xena the mammoth, and the beasts of La Brea, seething just once more. And, together, bones and teeth, femurs and memories, they forge a kind of beauty and horror-tinged history bleeding into a more than slightly terrifying future.
The questions Olson asks are, I think, meant to hurt—or at least to twist the knife of history until we are forced to see the present a bit more clearly. In “Who Gets to Be a Fossil,” for instance, she points out that while both Max the Mastodon and Thomas Jefferson get to be fossils, they’re treated completely differently—while “Sally Hemings was buried in a site in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, / which is now covered by the parking lots of the Hampton Inn on West / Main Street.” And if that does not make you run cold and then hot, I don’t really know what will.
There is a strange, pure beauty in this poetry of the dead and the past, but there is also a warning threading throughout the text. It is perhaps most explicitly clear in “Broken Sonnet on Teeth,” as Olson takes on the great sabre-toothed tigers of La Brea, fearsome predators of the past. (Or, you know, really big versions of my babycat, who joyously slaughters everything he can.) “Broken Sonnet on Teeth” ends with a reminder that none of this is really about bones, unless it’s about ours, and our planet’s:
We fear the knife / of the sabre-tooth, its name a clear warning, but we / miss its point—Smilodon died when its big prey / died out, but we’ll expire when the smallest life / on Earth does. Surely you’ve noticed the bees / have gone quiet? Forget teeth. Time to pray.
None of this is really about bones, unless they be our bones, and our society’s bones, and the rot within, and the murky future ahead. Olson’s reminder, here in The Last Mastodon, is as stark and as beautiful as fossils themselves.
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