Lisa Fay Coutley’s Host
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of several poetry collections, of which Host is the most recent and published by The University of Wisconsin Press. As noted by the book blurb, it “explores parasitic relationships—between men and women, sons and mothers, and humans and the earth—and considers their consequences.” This is most prominently seen in the collection’s final poem, “Why to Feel the Host,” as she discusses the Earth:
… So she’ll raze us. Not with flame
or wind or wave but humane hate—the way
a parasite drives an ant to balance on a blade
of grass, sacrificing itself to a progress
it can’t understand. A planet won’t
wait for love to free her from being
everyone’s everything. …
In this book, humans are a parasite to the Earth and to each other—just as a liver flatworm (I’m deducing given a google search) is to an ant. Unlike humans, the Earth continues on without emotion.
The power of this collection is its ability to capture emotional truth: the speaker’s truth. The details are apt, appropriate, and surprising. I love this book for its precision. For instance, in “September 1, 2019” she states
Would you change your life if you knew
corn growing sounds like a limb slipping
through a sleeve? I need to be surrounded
by heavy-headed sunflowers to see them
scream for a brightness none of us can hold.
As a woman who grew up in the midwest, I can hear this. I know that sound of a husk shucked from a cob. It’s a comparison that makes me say Yes! That! Yet, I wouldn’t have ever thought to put those two sounds together. Surprising yet true. We then carry on to sunflowers, which makes this entire section yellow in my mind: the corn, the sunflowers, the brightness of it all juxtaposed to the pain of losing it. It aches for us to do better.
Much of this collection is an aching from trauma. For instance, in “Crown” when the speaker says “I go to the bathroom / to see myself reflected, to know I still exist / inside pain.” It is a confirmation of self when the self has been irrevocably changed. Trauma can often cause a fog—a straining to understand and make sense of the incomprehensible. This book, however, is not a fog. It’s clear-sighted. Its work is not the digestion of trauma but the highlighting of it. The understanding of how that trauma formed not only the speaker but also humanity and how we are traumatizing the Earth, ourselves, and each other. As the speaker perfectly describes in another section in “September 1, 2019”: “We cannot stop / asking if there is not another, better, / easier reason we haven’t found a cure / for Earth. Maybe it’s as simple as looking / into that expired hope & repeating we / are the disease.”
Host by Lisa Fay Coutley