Poetry – As It Ought To Be

Wendy McVicker’s work is often known for its meticulous attention to the miraculous details of everyday life. We see this aspect of her work in earlier poems such as “Into the Dark,” which appeared in The Journal of Mythic Arts in 2008 and thrills us with lines such as “Summer evenings on the terrace / as the risen dark / flowed in, phosphorescence / of fireflies, and heat / lightning startling / the horizon” and “the tall shapes / of the thunder gods /tramping through the dark.” But there was always something lurking there in her work, something not quite said. McVicker’s latest collection, the chapbook Alone in the Burning from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, gives readers a glimpse into those quiet secrets that have been beneath all of her previous work.

Still firmly rooted in the domestic, McVicker utilizes a haunting tone as she allows her poems to imitate the slippery and hazy nature of traumatic memories while sharing childhood stories of family dysfunction. Even the titles of the poems reinforce this, as many of them are titled “When I was alone.” Because of this echoing, the reader is caught up in the way traumatic memories repeat themselves and begin to blur into one another. Lines from the poem on page 27, such as “I felt that forked fire// all the way/ through my body” and those from the one on page 10, such as “leaves in the trees/ breathed/ through my dreams” could be from the same poem, so cohesive and unified is this collection.

My favorite poem in Alone in the Burning is the “When I was alone” from page 13 which beautifully renders primal instincts. Lines such as “I knew how to wait: / one way to be safe // Running is another: / not my way” and “In the story the doe / broke and ran / across the clearing // That’s when the gun / found her // That’s how I learned to be still” remind the reader that there is more than just the fight or flight response to danger, there is also freeze.

But the collection also offers an answer to how we break that freeze, how we find ourselves again: language and imagination. In the first piece in the book, the modified haibun “Lost,” McVicker establishes the important (and sometimes dangerous and elusive) role language will play in the work:

                     The alphabet a rope
                                    slipping through my hands
                                                 each word a knot, burning

The penultimate piece in the book is also a modified haibun and counters the earlier “Lost” with “Found.” “This is a story about a girl who learned to live in books,” it begins. Its ending brings us into that life in books:

Language held the key
Long strings of letters flying
off the page took her with them

We are never alone, the collection seems to say, so long as we have books, so long as we have writing. In this way, Alone in the Burning begins to serve as an ars poetica of sorts. It presents tight and clever turns of phrase reminiscent of Diane di Prima while wrapping them in a meditative confrontation of the domestic similar to the later work of Sharon Olds. I have long been a fan of McVicker’s work and this slim volume makes me excited to see where else her poems will go. As she says in the final “When I was alone,” “This has been / a long journey” and I, for one, am grateful she has brought the reader along on it with her.

Alone in the Burning
by Wendy McVicker
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024
ISBN: 9781962405072
$14.00

About the Author: Jennifer Schomburg Kanke’s work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah and Salamander. She is a winner of a Sheila-Na-Gig Fiction Award and her poetry collection, The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had, is now available from Kelsay Book. Her poetry collection centered on her experiences with ovarian cancer, Little Stone, Little Stone, is forthcoming in 2026 from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. She can be found on YouTube as Meter&Mayhem.