The eighty-eight pages in Museum of the Soon to Depart (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2024) by Andy Young flow with exquisitely phrased words of grief and loss. Yet, no matter how beautifully written, the poems are nonetheless quite somber. The dying and death of the narrator’s mother from brain cancer, coupled with poems about plagues, disasters, calamities, war, political violence, and even pinworms, are some of the subjects of these works. Those easily disturbed and prone to depression might want to tiptoe lightly into this collection, but for those brave enough to confront all the hurt, this is a breathtaking collection by a poet with a true gift of expression.
As reflected in the title, the poet imagines a museum as the structure upon which she hangs her own works of art, however mournful her verbal art might be. She sets the tone immediately in the first poem, “Grief during Carnival Season,” with vivid details and a heightened awareness of grief. With lines like “I used to think I would die / of sadness but have learned there is no such luck,” the poem leaves no doubt about its strength and impact. It is also a sharp poem, with observations like “the Dipper is less / a ladle than an axe: just look / next time how it hacks against / the heavens.”
Several of the poems address the death of the poet’s mother—or the death of the narrator of the poems. “My Mother’s Skull is Opened for the First Time” begins the poetic journey and shows a mother of faith who “still takes the wafer / wears lipstick with her / headband of staples.” In “Birdwatching,” readers learn that “The day after my mother died, / I went to find the Indigo Buntings.” With chilling language and excellent technique, the poet also describes the loneliness of a “Pandemic Funeral” in which “In a Facebook Funeral, / siblings sit a pew apart.”
The poems—like exhibits in a museum—travel the globe. From New Orleans in the opening poem to “Abandoning the Land in Ecuador” to “Raw Wool at Kustanai Textile Processing Plant” and other foreign places, Andy Young shows her flexibility as a poet and her grasp of how grief in the larger world and individual grief tangle together. For example, in the poem “Bomb Shelter, Placa del Diamant, Barcelona,” she writes, “if you are resting it’s because someone is dying in another city.”
There are harsh, brutal, and disturbing images in some of the poems, with lines like “One’s nose is gone. Another lost his whole face. / Where is the body that arm belongs to?” There is also a deep weariness that approaches cynicism in such poems as “Ash Wednesday 2020,” where the poet observes that “a few weeks later the borders would close / again the rich decide who lives.”
The three sections warn readers and reflect the collection’s metaphor with titles like “Display of Grief,” “Hall of Pestilence and Unhealed Wounds,” and “Archives of Prayer.” Within the poems collected in such melancholy captions, if one looks hard enough, there is also hope—or perhaps just irony, as in the post-Katrina poem “Grief Walk.” In that poem, “the city’s people / were once left to thirst as they watched floodwaters swallow their shotgun houses.” Yet, from that disaster, “gorgeous, invasive flowers keel over / above my head, the air roiling / with cobalt dragonflies.”
A haunting, powerful collection that pulls readers headfirst into a blend of personal pain and a world on fire, Museum of the Soon to Depart is, without a doubt, a commanding book of poetry. The poems land like gut punches, but if Andy Young is brave enough to bear witness to such turmoil across so many landscapes, readers should be brave enough to bear witness to this museum she creates.
Poet Andy Young at the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum on Tuesday, September 5, 2023. Photo by Chris Granger
Andy Young is originally from southern West Virginia but now lives in New Orleans. Young is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers. In addition to her four chapbooks, Museum of the Soon to Depart is her first full-length collection of poetry. She teaches at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.
Leave a Reply