Book Review :: Nest of Matches by Amie Whittemore
Review by Jamie Macarty
Speaking from a Nest of Matches, Amie Whittemore knows “the long burden / of… death.” In “Summer Swim,” the poet writes, “Too often, my poems are love notes / / to the past.”
While Whittemore’s poems harvest “a penchant / for melancholy,” they also write through an acceptance of multiple losses and a recovery of a whole self. Just as “death upon death” gives rise to an “urgent but futile wish to control its narrative,” so too, “is it possible to love one’s / own tattered self.”
The “tattered self” in Nest of Matches “seek[s], like every / / fled human before [her],” a sense of self “beyond fragmentation” and the “freedom” to “unfurl” a queer self as legitimate of life and worthy of love.
The tension between these dynamics is reflected in the collection’s title. In “nest” there is shelter but it is a hotbed of undesirable things. The hemispherical shape of a nest echoes in the sometimes-ruminating poems and in the twelve-poem series devoted to each month’s full moon.
In “Flower Moon,” a name given to May’s full moon attributed to the Algonquin peoples, Whittemore cues the reader to a “turn” of awareness “never-not-awkward”:
“Here I am again,
giving the moon
my baggage,
asking it to carry
my longing,
my fullness.”
Depicting the tidal forces between Earth and the moon and self and other, Whittemore’s “moon” series cannot help but conjure Mary Oliver’s Twelve Moons (1972). The moon is a feminine symbol associated with water, emotion, the rhythm of light, and the cycle of time. Or as Whittemore writes in “Aubade,” “there’s so many agains inside me,” “new and repetitious as moons.”
“Language remains a wobbly bridge” in Amie Whittemore’s Nest of Matches, but language is what “veins” the collection’s “fearless and true” conversations over “life’s / many distances.”
Nest of Matches by Amie Whittemore. Autumn House Press, March 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
