Elizabeth Scanlon, Whosoever Whole

 

Figures

Most of cooking is waiting for change to occur;
water softens the rice, chicken skin crisping.

My son does his science homework at the table, questions
about physical or chemical properties.

A physical change doesn’t alter the substance.
In chemical change, there is a reaction,

A new substance is formed,
energy is either given off or absorbed.

I think of the Novembers of his baby years,
not very long ago.

They were cold.

How is your Anthropocene going?
How many more days of collapse
do you have in you?

I’m intrigued by the gestures and curious monologues of Philadelphia poet and editor Elizabeth Scanlon’s second collection, Whosoever Whole (Oakland CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2024), following on the heels of her full-length debut, Lonesome Gnosis (Horsethief Books, 2017) and chapbooks The Brain Is Not the United States/The Brain Is the Ocean (The Head & The Hand Press, 2016) and Odd Regard (Philadelphia PA: ixnay press, 2013). “In a trace I saw the moment when you left / the person who was once yourself and,” she writes, to open the poem “The Arrangement,” “in just the same way you look back / at a broom-clean room you rented, with some sorrow / and some relief, shut the door.” Set in a quartet of numbered sections, Scanlon’s lyrics have punch; her poems are performative narratives that require to be read aloud, with a wave of the hand. “Remember when,” the first half of the short poem “Cleaning Windows” reads, as a kind of accusation, “they were building / that building / It felt like forever / Remember when / that was an empty lot / It was like that forever / And even now / when we walk by it / my peripheral vision / is confused [.]”

Scanlon composes sharp and descriptive monologues and short scene studies, referencing astrophysicists, the bottom of the sea, billboards, summer, aging, myths and materiality, money and memory. These compact poems hold some serious heft, through which Scanlon explores the magical facts of daily living, delighting in ordinary moments, degrees and objects that are never purely ordinary. Her view is rapturous, panning the ordinary for wonder. “It is maybe gluttonous to find this so cheerful,” she writes, to close the poem “Astrophysicists in Spain,” “but there is no sin in space, which is why // we want to go there. / It may be that the astrophysicists, // learned as they are, / knew that we’d take the bait // and ask no further/ about the location of the heart.”