Anna Leigh Knowles, Conditions of the Wounded

 

ESCAPE PLANS

Every August, I scan each new classroom for windows I could break.
Which hallways are more accessible. Then maybe how, later on
in the semester, I’ll start to notice the impulses of my own students.
Which ones are at-risk. Which ones I believe could kill me.
The answer is all of them. I don’t say I feel hunted or that I’ve been
ready for the worst. My students catch me staring
out the windows and I don’t tell them I’m looking for the thickest trees
for the widest width. Which ones could catch the most bullets.
How I imagine flipping up all the tables and chairs. What objects,
if any, are available for a blockade. There are days I can’t leave
my office when I have to. I force myself into the classroom anyway.
Take my chances. Students run in the halls and I freeze. Keys ready
after class, I can’t open doors fast enough. Every day is a protest
against someone who wants me dead. These bookshelves are my best
buffer. But I wouldn’t upturn my desk, wouldn’t make objects
into a shield or shell because that would be a mistake. I’ve thought
of everything. It’s a long drop down, but I would jump.

It would be impossible not to be affected by the poems that make up Conditions of the Wounded (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), the incredibly powerful book-length debut by American poet Anna Leigh Knowles. Originally from Littleton, Colorado, Knowles writes a powerful lyric, much of which articulates around and through her terrifying proximity to the violence, tragedy of and fallout from the school shooting and attempted bombing at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado on April 20, 1999. “Even then I didn’t know the state flower / was the Columbine,” she writes, as part of the poem “BURYING THE TIME CAPSULE AT DARK / NOT LONG AFTER THE COLUMBINE / HIGH SCHOOL SHOOTING,” “laboring beneath the peaks, // translucent skins purpling us all. // From that day forward, we rattled inside / while the sounds of the outer world went on.” The poems exude both an urgency and an exhaustion, a tension and the endurance of trauma, writing out a struggle and even a desperation to endure, and even survive. As the press release references, “To be raised on high alert,” offering how “her poetry explores how fear, pain, and anguish can unexpectedly take hold and settle into the smallest spaces within us.”

Opening with a single poem, “The Bomb Shelter,” and into four titled sections of lyrics—“READY THE DYING LIGHT, CRY OUT,” “CONDITIONS OF THE WOUNDED,” “LIVING FROM THE INSIDE OUT” and “AFTERMATH”—her lyric narratives are tightly-woven and tightly-wound, without a wasted word or image. She knows how to articulate a tension or a tragedy without tarnishing, and manages a remarkable comprehension, awareness and compassion in poems that stare down the worst of it all without flinching. These are not the poems of someone on the outside looking in, but someone on the inside, conscious of the toll such traumas take, attempting to simultaneously document and process just how far down it goes. “It’s time to admit I tried to forget,” she writes, to open “TO THE WOMAN IN WITHDRAWL / NEXT COT OVER AT THE DENVER FACILITY / FOR PUBLIC INEBRIATES,” “the way you fell to the ground // in shakes, how you hauled yourself / toward me by your forearms after rolling // from your cot, so slow and unbelievable / I didn’t move, couldn’t—honest to God, // I wanted to see you make it to whatever / asylum burst past the thought of sleep.” Her poems are stunning, startling and unsettling; even devastating, as she writes around survival, tragedy and trauma, of school shootings and addiction, and the long, slow burn that follows, attempting to move forward, forever aware that the shadows of such events are never far behind. This is an incredibly powerful and unforgettable collection. As she writes as part of the poem “CHILDREN ARE BURIED”:

Whole town briefly famous,
then forgotten.

One of the dead boys lived
five houses down. A week after

the shooting, funerals. Everywhere
we looked, dark cars slinked

along dripping edges of side streets.
Miles off, bells struggled

in the back gully of the canal.
Another victim’s funeral.

Heads fixed in hands.
Coffee and casseroles shuttled

Behind doors hammered
in wreaths.