Survival Expo

The opening lines of some of Caki Wilkinson’s poems in The Survival Expo insist on telling us what wasn’t happening (“I wasn’t driving,” “There weren’t three foxes frozen in the street,” “It wasn’t just the zebra mussels,” “We weren’t the best”) or what mostly is (“It’s mostly men inside the Agricenter,” “Well, mostly I stood by, suggestively”). Others venture a coy hazarding or confessing (“So I’ve turned a little feral” and “Suppose we’ve undersold the rhapsody”). What is Wilkinson trying to convey through this destabilizations of plot and narrator? That every opening is conditional, can be reinterpreted? That this speaker is operating, with cheeky and eccentric humor, in a narrative world where multiple things can be true at once? The sonic forces in these poems (which are, frankly, incredible) can carry any contradiction. 

Reading this book feels like fast forwarding through sets of elegant-but-haphazard portraits jarred against each other, such as in the poem “Hope Is a Thing with Feathers” where a dust mop and blue boa bloom into a feathered bowling woman wearing a dress from seasons past. The poet’s cousin, Hope, recurs throughout the book, as blueberry-stealing alter-ego to Wilkinson “who can sniff out pity like a feral cat” and carries “a knife and Midol in her purse.” In contrast, Wilkinson gets straight A’s and later, teaches a course on modern poetry and listens to a meditation app. Both born in and of “flyover country,” the duo feel lovingly fated for each other despite how they are positioned, which may be Wilkinson’s most radical assertion, that one’s childhood syntax can displace the losses produced by neoliberal aspiration.