Blue Atlas

Blue Atlas by Susan Rich takes its title from the Blue Atlas Cedar found in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. As the book’s epigraph explains: “It is the hardiest species and can reproduce spontaneously from seeds.”The tree serves as a metaphor for resilience and resourcefulness in poems that center on a woman’s unplanned pregnancy and the subsequent abortion that has left deep emotional scars:

If you kept walking, you would eventually
   step outside of yourself.
You would leave the bones of your body,

the bloodlines to all that you loved.

You would be free of breasts, liberated
from the eyes of body admirers—

In poems that take the reader to Europe, West Africa, and Morocco, the speaker’s tone fluctuates between a sense of overwhelm and the hope of finding a way through the pain. In “The Day After the Abortion,” the third-person perspective offers the speaker some distance from which to reflect on an abortion, and the familial shame and pressure—in part driven by a sister’s engagement—that led her to abort. The speaker imagines an alternate reality, one in which she had agency over the course of her own life, where, “immersed […] in a galaxy of bodies,” she would have “erased the world // where an unborn could be vacuumed up into small pieces / so that a bride and a mother could sleep.”

Rich’s language is honest, raw, and emotion-driven. The poems retell the speaker’s story from different vantage points, using a range of forms—including questionnaires, an outline for a freshman essay, and a curriculum vitae, among others—to explore feelings of guilt, regret, loneliness, and self-doubt:

If I didn’t make the choice but it was the right choice.
If I made the choice but it was the wrong choice.
If I could go back and find my own way.