Alison Prine, Loss and Its Antonym

 

SONG OF A SMALL CITY

a small city is not an apple

it is not a cathedral or a gown

a small city produces a confetti rain of tree blossoms

in the breath of a small city there are translations and the clinking of coins

here light falls across our faces

here one hour is transplanted into the next

a small city does not recognize its own hands

a small city holds up less sky and is therefore less grand and less weary

a small city does not muscle toward the sea

the distance from the top to the bottom of a small city is one lost shoe

I’ve been appreciating Burlington, Vermont poet Alison Prine’s second full-length collection, Loss and Its Antonym (Sequim WA: Headmistress Press, 2024), produced as winner of the 2023 Sappho’s Prize in Poetry. Following the publication of her debut collection, Steel (Cider Press Review, 2016), the poems in Prine’s Loss and Its Antonym are composed around silence, as a kind of hush; articulating so much of what is spoken and unspoken, set down in fierce and delicate first-person lyrics. “it is hard to distinguish each element / locust blossoms falling from high branches,” she writes, as part of the poem “STRAYED,” “a full ashtray on the kitchen table / the smell of hard rain // posture of a woman ready to step / from one life to another [.]” There is such an ease to these lines across some difficult terrain, of losses that sequence and compound, including the early loss of her mother, and subsequent stepmother, as she writes in the poem “WISH BONE”: “My sister worried at our father’s wedding— / that because she was seven when our mother died // we would lose our stepmother / when she turned fourteen. She believed // loss was divisible by sevens.” There is something astounding about how she balances such weight, from lines that seem, at times, almost weightless to the depths of such losses, and how those losses continue to reveal themselves, even after a distance of years; something astounding, as well, in how Prine balances between those weights, while still composing a collection of poems about emerging out the other side from those losses, from that same grief. “Look for the small purple fleck in the center,” she writes, as part of the poem “CLOSE,” “it isn’t always there, but when it is // it focuses the grace. So much of what we lost / was held in the same hands.” In the end, this might be a collection around grief and loss, but one that emerges just as much into Prine acknowledging the bonds of family, and of sisters; a bond that allowed for the possibility of moving through and potentially beyond such devastating losses. As the same poem closes: “I don’t know what happened // in your family, but in my family it felt / like the world was split, over and over // and all that was left / were sisters.”