(At) Wrist

Tacey M. Atsitty titles her second book (At) Wrist: what does she see in the wrist, a joint never before granted a poetry collection all its own? She sees an emblem of physical and familial bonds, carried with her everywhere: “in bloodline: same         through our wrists         telling of the same.” She sees a twinned history of Diné (Navajo) and Christian devotional practices, guiding her perceptions of the natural world: “cicadas sound come, come / as though they had wrists // to shake gourds at His coming.” And in wrists’ gentle curves, she sees the parentheses that pair up and drift apart across her book’s three sections; those shapes remind her, in turn, of lovers meeting and breaking apart: “We came and went, as if we were lace for the breaking, / our lives rounding out like arcs of our wrists.”

Wrists can stand for the parts of ourselves that we can offer, that others can take or drop; Atsitty dedicates her book “To shizhé’é”—Navajo, “my father”— “and every man who extended me his wrist.” Across (At) Wrist, wrists are bared, brushed, braided round—and occasionally brutalized, as in the truck accident recalled in “The Night My Wrist Broke.” That poem ends with a metamorphosis, as trauma transforms into an unlikely instrument—as much medical as musical:

I kept my right wrist close to my chest:
a pain so clear I could see every empty cavity

in my ribcage, heart thumping like a bass guitar—
hand strumming to the sound of a girl wailing.

Atsitty’s favored form throughout (At) Wrist is the sonnet, whose centuries-old traditions she extends and refashions. Her experiments with the form—the ribbon-thin “Lace Sonnet,” a 13-line “Candy Dish Sonnet”—both praise and pattern themselves after decorative arts, revealing the often unappreciated labor they require. In lacemaking and poetry alike, Atsitty discovers fittingly intricate figures for the countless ways our lives overlap and intertwine. That’s the subject of the sonnet crown “Lacing,” Atsitty’s longest published poem to date, and her strongest:

            we are soon to thread, soon to embellish,

then loop back into each other: braided the waywe were taught to approach each other—the same way.