Nearly two-thirds of the way through Wish Ave, I see the question I’d been wondering since the beginning: “Is there a real Wish Ave?”
The response is as simple as it is delightful: “Sure. Between Payne Rd and 86th, west of Ditch.” As an Indiana native who grew up driving on and around 86 th Street, one of the main east-west thoroughfares on the northside of Indianapolis, seeing a sliver of my flyover state in this book’s pages imbued me with a certain sense of pride. Yet, beyond the local connection I have to this whimsically named neighborhood street that ostensibly gives this collection its name, I love the dialogue that starts this aptly titled poem, “The Real Wish Ave”; it represents a moment of undoubtable clarity amidst a collection that can feel at turns dream-like, almost mythical. I love this moment even more because although it clarifies the geographical where of this collection’s title, it’s almost immediately complicated by an impossible question: “By real you mean true?” And so poet Alessandra Lynch thrusts her readers back into the richness and mystery of meaning-making and the process of coming to terms with ourselves and our place in the world.
Wish Ave (Alice James Books, 2024) tracks a speaker who treks through spaces both tangible and intangible, present and past, via her spirited efforts to meet painter Wassily Kandinsky’s challenge “To harmonize the whole—the task in art”—a challenge Lynch herself invokes by using it as the first line to one of her opening poems, “Two Voices Dispute Harmony Harmoniously.” The search for harmony amidst disparateness and disconnectedness lies at the core of this complex collection. In searching for said harmony, no place is off limits, no matter how intimate. Whether gardens or forests, hospital rooms or cemeteries, “the separate quarters / of the Heart” or “the tiny stream of childhood,” there must be a place for everything because, this collection argues, the only appropriate response to the speaker’s question, “What being is small?” is that no individual being or thing is small—not a one.
Wish Ave is the fifth poetry collection from this seasoned poet. Lynch’s most recent previous collections, Pretty Tripwire (Alice James Books, 2021) and Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment (Alice James Books, 2017), showcase her formal range and lyrical precision through poems that tackle difficult themes: sexual assault, disordered eating, miscarriage, familial conflict. Pretty Tripwire, which investigates the boundaries of the self and the complexity of relationships with others and the natural world, unearths said themes via a conflicted and profoundly human speaker who admits “Maybe I don’t want / a voice at all.” Wish Ave is likewise invested in relationships and questions of voice, yet its poems are tethered less overtly to discrete subject matter and more to the processes of unearthing and tending—oneself, one’s family, the natural world—in the first place.
One undercurrent within Wish Ave’s poems is the speaker’s journey through memory as she tries to make peace with her past. Specifically, the speaker grapples with the guilt she carries “like a wounded tree, a shaven birch” that, in her childhood, her “great carelessness” caused the sudden departure of one of her beloved neighbors, Michiko, a woman who “planted flowers / on every street” and “was fed / by the sun.” Simultaneously, these poems move through the speaker’s present season of grief amidst preparing to bury her mother’s ashes and grappling with a child’s—her child’s?—overwhelming sorrow (“‘Everything is Loss’ the child said / Tiredly, very tiredly / his adult eyes / Darkly shining”). Yet, what feels most pressing in this collection is the urgency the speaker carries as she struggles towards a deeper understanding of herself, of the vastness of the world, and of every flower in it. It’s worth noting Wish Ave transcends poetry alone and often functions concurrently as a drama, replete with a cast of characters, narrative snippets, parentheticals that border on stage directions (“One Voice, the Agitated Speaker”), and song (“A Song from the Speaker”).
Fittingly, then, given its kinship with a drama, one of the book’s most notable features is its dialogic nature and the way some poems feel almost polyphonic as the speaker and two central voices collude, interrupt, and struggle together towards making meaning. In “[Why aren’t you speaking to me?],” a poem told by two voices (per the parenthetical explanation before the poem begins—these sorts of “tags” indicating the characters or speakers in a poem are a recurring feature throughout the collection), we see dialogue in action, indicated here by the triple hyphen demarcating one speaker from the other:
Are you afraid of Memory—?
—How so?
How it sinks, anchoring nothingness, every pore widemouthed
before it….
—Does it want to undo us?
It wants to reveal us—.
Dialogue such as the above, where each speaker is interrupted seemingly before finishing their thought, contributes to how the collection as a whole resists a straightforward “aboutness.” Yet, dialogue like this is exactly what enables these poems to access more profound truths as they enact the struggle and non-linear process of both meaning-making and of moving through grief. Specifically, the conversation in these lines push Wish Ave towards a hard-fought truth: while there are myriad reasons one may be “afraid of Memory”—here understood as a kind of primeval entity, whose name alone merits capitalization—ultimately, what memory seeks is self-revelation rather than erasure. And, if the whole of our being can be harmonized, this harmony can only come through facing each part of ourselves and that which has made us ourselves in the first place.
It should also be noted that the voices in this collection extend well beyond the two named “voices” and the speaker. Thankfully, Lynch knows achieving the kind of harmony and truths this collection strives toward cannot be the endeavor of a single individual, and this collection is better for its invocation of Jean Valentine, Gerald Stern, Emily Dickinson, Rimbaud, and Sappho who all grace these pages alongside other numerous figures including the speaker’s mother, a brother, children, Michiko. The resulting panoply of voices, including those of the dead who are “sure as safety pins, / clairvoyant, each sweetly / clairvoyant, their Voices still speaking / to us” allows Lynch more inroads towards harmonizing the whole, for what are our own voices but an amalgamation of all who have touched us and made us who we are?
A final voice in Wish Ave that merits mentioning is that of silence. The speaker directly declares “Silence is its own voice,” something Lynch enacts by writing “SILENCE” as a kind of section break within several poems. By so doing, Lynch centers silence, alongside the deep listening that silence can engender, as a speaker powerful as any other, much like a measure of rest in a score of music can be just as loud and enlightening as the notes that precede and/or follow it. Indeed, the silence within this collection is one necessitating more than just white space or line breaks; it’s a silence that must actively speak so as to command the reader’s attention more acutely. Importantly, silence’s centrality allows Wish Ave to explore a related and equally important concept: that of listening, and listening deeply. On the final page of “Grebe,” the collection’s longest poem, the speaker notes, “The rules become less about contact, more about listening / The real rule is to pay attention to the dignity of light.” This kind of attentiveness is crucial not only because it allows for the taking in of information but also, and perhaps more importantly, because it is emblematic of something deeper: paying attention and attending to the world around
oneself.
This sort of attending, or tending, becomes most evident via this collection’s reverence for and celebration of nature. “How lovely / that any flower grows” is declared amidst a poem where the two voices discuss loneliness. Elsewhere, the speaker notes “The quiet fervor of bulbs pushing up / is one sacred square in my heart.” Even if the “bulbs pushing up” is just one sacred square of the speaker’s heart, each poem here explores a different sacred square of the speaker’s heart, and the collection as a whole enacts the irrefutable connectedness of each piece of each of us to ourselves and to each other: “One moves and the others need to sway.” Reading and sitting with these poems compels me to realize that, truly, as Lynch writes, “Every being is harnessed to another and another and soon.”
That is, we need each other and the world around us; there is no other way to “harmonize the whole” of our very selves. Although the revelations that being attuned to memory, to our shortcomings, and to the ways we’ve failed those we’ve loved can be painful (all things which this collection is acutely aware of), Lynch shows that this hard-fought knowledge is ultimately liberatory in “I Love My Brother”:
Why pretend anymore I am not disconnected
or divisive as the rest? I make walls
out of petals….
…
There’s an insect in the interstice that has no fingers,
but it is signaling for a mate
or it is dying,
its body a delicate wire hooked to a few translucent petals
that are its wings. I don’t need to touch it
to believe in love. I love my brother— he is often the bearer—
this time his hands fill with “the last fireflies!” he cries—.
Without fireflies
or birds, what is the sky?
Our bodies are all delicate and, yes, disconnected and divisive, this collection suggests; yet, this is no reason not “to believe in love” regardless. Wish Ave, then, serves as a reminder that (re)awakening to our own failings and disconnectedness is pivotal in moving towards unity within ourselves and in relation to everyone and everything around us. In some ways, this unity may seem paradoxical—attainable only after admitting our own disunity—yet this collection pushes readers to accept incongruities and truths which may be more complex than meets the eye. For instance, while Wish Ave is indeed a geographical, physical place, it is likewise an avenue for the speaker’s mind to travel up, down, and across as she locates her wish for harmony and travels interiorly so as to approach it. And while this collection presents harmony as something sought but never acquired, this seeking is worth the effort at least in part for the revelations uncovered along the way; otherwise, the speaker would never have learned that “Dark has its velvet too.”
While Lynch’s speaker declares earlier in “I Love My Brother” that we “can do nothing about this world but weep / or celebrate,” this collection invites both, resulting in poems worth not just reading, but rereading. The winding paths each line and each voice travels are worth following, and the poems here will remain with readers far beyond having finished the collection or having learned where Wish Ave is on the map.