Barrelhouse Reviews: Ardor by Alyse Knorr

Reviewed by Sarah Giragosian

Gasher Press / September 2023 / 83 pp

How do we nurture and sustain love and kinship in the Anthropocene? Alyse Knorr’s newest poetry collection offers the blueprints for an environmental ethics grounded in queer intimacies and the elastic and creative interrelationships between human and non-human worlds. Whether digging in the yard among the “electric worms that / eat the nitrogen trash…and the dandelions that never / die” or rooting through the archives to decipher Elizabeth Bishop’s handwriting, Knorr’s poems take seriously the injunction to practice close attention and imagine alternative possibilities for the future.  Vital is the collection’s investment in a politics of futurity, offering a model of a queer reproductive family even while the ecological crisis remains a palpable threat. Ardor tunes the imagination towards the possibility of a sustainable, even abundant, earth.

In “Rabbit Lake Trail,” for example, where the trail map reads “names like Suicide Peak and Powerline Pass,” and the landscape opens to a scene of a dog’s joy and “ecstasy of ptarmigan and mountain and the trail along / the ridge,” the speaker imagines how she will describe the creatures and land to her beloved.  She muses, “You are an instrument of accuracy, not precision. How to explain?” The imperative to be accurate means avoiding the danger of “romanticiz[ing] the landscape,” an ethical and ecological position that acknowledges how pastoral and Arcadian projects, particularly in the US, have often been tied to colonial conquest and gendered and cultural dominance. And still, being committed to accuracy, the speaker sees in the “glacial-carved basin,” that the “spruce gave way to scrub and tundra and the willows began to heal themselves…” Even where peril and ecological degradation exist, the speaker recognizes the renewing potential of nature. In an era of ever-proliferating apocalyptic and dystopian narratives about the earth, Knorr coaxes us to perceive and affirm the reparative power of the natural world, just as we must be prepared to honor the power of our love.

In this collection, the poet’s wisdom is coupled with a contagious sense of whimsy and play. It’s no surprise that Ardor’s élan vital is the ode and love poem. “And Ode,” for example, delights in the connective and relational force of the word “and,” a conjunction pervasive throughout the collection. Its repeated use describes an inclusive principle as well as the capacious range of the poet’s lines. Panoramic in their scope, compound and paratactic lines abound, often indexing the abundant life of the natural world:

In the creek of herons and snakes we chose our daughter’s name—
watched it rise into the pines and down the dirt road
[…] over the homes of deer and raccoons
and bears and orange cats raising their babies in dumpsters—watched it
lift up and leave, traveling further than we ever thought we could.

This poem, “East River, VA,” builds on its futurist thrust: the daughter’s christening occurs in the sanctum of a vibrant ecosystem where humans and wildlife are fit enough to reproduce, each making homes in the liminal zones of human-animal ecotones.

Also compelling are the poems that work through the pleasures of constraint and release, as in “I Begin and Begin.”  A sonnet as fresh and innovative as Terrance Hayes’ reimaginings of the form, Knorr’s poem recalls what Hayes refers to as “wind in a box,” a conceit for the dual impulses of the sonnet form that shuttles between enclosure and freedom.  For Knorr, the sonnet enables an inquiry into concealment and release, both the closeting that heteronormativity impinges upon the queer person and liberating energies of gender-bending and erotic release. A long poem divided into fourteen sections (rather than lines), “I Begin and Begin” is also an ars poetica, inquiring into poetry’s inclination towards closure:

A teacher once told me poetry is wanting
always to close itself, so you must constantly
begin anew, over and over again—you must
create whole new worlds every time you write.

In the context of queer poetry, the poem raises the question of whether the closet, a space that Knorr eroticizes, can also be conceived as a site of creativity and inspiration. In the poet’s hands, the closet is a terrain for playful gendered activity and the enactment of desire through make-believe, reading, and writing.  The presence of the closet also makes possible the exuberant release that Knorr captures in the final section of the poem (and here note the emphasis on the queer domain of “camp”):

One day at camp it was so hot that we ran into the murky red river with all our clothes on—just left the kids in their military-file lines near the changing tent and plunged into the scalded lake all in one jump, and she laughed and laughed and we felt so relieved and we were sticky drying all day long.

Wonderfully Sapphic and strange, Ardor enlists the poetic lineages and traditions of Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Bishop, Sappho, and Adrienne Rich, the cherished fairy godmothers of her collection.  Like these poets to whom the poet pays homage, Knorr is invested in a queer poetics that asks its readers to think and feel queerly, to challenge normative sense-making practices.  Such a poetics does not seek to establish a norm or an operative paradigm, but instead enacts its deconstructionist impulse to question an immanent or stable “I.”  Often, Knorr revels instead in the ontologies of human-animal interrelationships and etymological quandaries that have equal stakes in science and metaphysics, as—hilariously— a speaker muses on her backyard’s “thoroughfare of cats” wandering around the “multiverse.” 

Challenging queer theory’s inclinations towards anti-futurity and apocalyptic visions of the Anthropocene, Knorr’s unique contribution to ecopoetics is in line with Nicole Seymour’s Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination, which traces an archive of work committed to a future that is at once queer and environmental. An adventurous collection, filled with humor and optimism, Ardor is a future-thinking text.

Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collections Queer Fish (winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, 2017) and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020) and co-editor of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press, 2023). Mother Octopus (co-winner of the Halcyon Prize) is forthcoming from Middle Creek Press.