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<\/a>The late Adrienne Rich once described her use of received poetic forms as \u201casbestos gloves\u201d for handling difficult material. In Tacey M. Atsitty\u2019s new collection Rain Scald<\/em> (University of New Mexico Press), sonnet, sestina, and villanelle surface amid prose poems, columnar incantations, a concrete poem with white space leaking down one side, and textual shapes that play their divisions like percussion. For this poet, the more \u201cacademic\u201d forms hold elemental forces (ice, fire, \u201csand-swollen\u201d water, salvaged nails) and allow them to sing in obsessive repetition. Even the book’s title implies elemental effects on human and animal bodies: “rain scald” is a common bacterial skin condition occurring in horses after rain.<\/p>\nAtsitty is an MFA-trained poet as well as Din\u00e9 of the Sleep Rock People, born for the Tangle People, and her work exposes the tension between those worlds with courage and care. She does not shy away from her inherited entanglement in the Latter-day Saint faith, with its deeply damaging attempts to \u201cadopt\u201d Native children from the 1940s to the 1990s, or from the radiation exposure and soil contamination resulting from uranium mining on Navajo Nation lands. Material traces of her worlds bump and bruise \u2014 the song \u201cJesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam,\u201d an extinct Din\u00e9 healing ceremony \u2014 as this poet compresses language to embody each collision on the page.<\/p>\n
Atsitty\u2019s sestina, \u201cRazed,\u201d ostensibly about mending a sheep fence, enacts collective memory through wire and bent nails, words taking on their own sharp, twisted life as they repeat and bend again. The poem\u2019s syntax grows less discursive toward its alliterative end, its key word \u201cmend\u201d warped from verb to noun:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Here, I\u2019ve searched for rust and metal, and mended<\/p>\n
circles. I\u2019ve taken to metal detectors, to mend
\ndiamond rings, nails, and nickels; all dropped
\nby someone at some time. The ring settles to wire,
\nthe axed tree dries, is gathered, stacked, and nailed.
\nHere, I\u2019ve come to listen for the crunch of coral
\nbeneath my boots or chants from dust. I fall<\/p>\n
into mend, biting straight these nails,
\nhammer in hand, I drop in the corral\u2014
\nAll about me is wire, winding down like fall.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The speaker is recalling her father\u2019s voice, \u201cBack before the wind spurred us haywire,\u201d as he tells her where a hogan used to be. She takes a moment to explain her terms \u2014 \u201cPosts with their teeth (bent nails)\/ are all that\u2019s left when a family leaves corrals\u201d \u2014 but lets the poem\u2019s rhyme and repetition do its \u201cwinding\u201d work. Her sonnet \u201cWhen Water Came to Me\u201d is the only case in this collection that seems too attached to end rhyme, so insistent that the repeated line \u201cit eats through my coat hair\u201d loses its bite with \u201cleaves me winterbare.\u201d<\/p>\n
Atsitty also makes use of the incantatory phrase, a poetic convention far older than the sonnet or sestina, with roots in both biblical and indigenous traditions. In \u201cTo Gorge,\u201d which riffs on the \u201cseparation of the sexes\u201d in a Din\u00e9 creation story, the speaker invokes a woman split from and forced by the male world, all phallus and gun; she interrupts rhyming stanzas with \u201cO wretched hussy!\u201d and \u201cO wretched grease!\u201d The apostrophe becomes a bitter parody, until, in the poem\u2019s last line, woman has her way: \u201cShe explodes without them, sulfur and honey.\u201d Other invocations in the book call up inhuman forces (\u201cCome moth madness! Come!\u201d) or collective lament, as in the Jeremiad-sounding, italicized \u201cO the depravity of my people!<\/em>\u201d This poet\u2019s range in register, even when using similar tropes, is another marker of her likely hard-won skill in navigating several worlds.<\/p>\n Most of all, whether writing in old forms to make them new or laying out her lines in prose, Atsetty knows the force of words and lets the reader in on this lost innocence. In the second part of \u201cHis Women,\u201d a line-broken turn of phrase turns nearly deadly:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I knew the word sex<\/em>; it was private. point their guitars up and wail, \u201cShe\u2019s my cherry hog-tied on the floor, asleep in her own urine. but hadn\u2019t known about him calf-roping. \u201cThat\u2019s Belle,\u201d he answered. \u201cGo fix breakfast and stood at the stove\u2014pushing fat around\u2014 <\/p>\n Couplets hold this painful scene in place, its fluids threatening to spill. Atsetty\u2019s expert handling of words\u2019 material power, however precariously contained, makes this poem one of the most memorable in the collection. Words repeat and ring against each other throughout the book: \u201cgorge\u201d used as a noun or verb; \u201cexplode\u201d bearing Dickinsonian drive and literal death; \u201crot\u201d and \u201crust\u201d doing their entropic work; \u201csalt\u201d in bodies, in bread, to be licked by a heifer, or gripped in the fist; and the recurring \u201cgrease\u201d or \u201cfat\u201d that eases or erases boundaries, that nourishes, that leaks and spills.<\/p>\n Atsitty\u2019s collection ends with a three-part \u201cEvensong\u201d made of villanelle and two sonnets. In the first poem, the speaker kneels \u201cat the throat of this tree,\u201d invoking its life force along with that of Christian language (\u201cruth\u201d as noun or name, and \u201cFather<\/em>\u201d). In the villanelle\u2019s obsessive repetitions, \u201ccut\u201d and \u201cspill\u201d sound most insistently; this speaker finds herself wanting to worship between worlds, which do not hold in place, although the tree \u2014 and its poetic form \u2014 remains. The central sonnet in this triptych also functions as a water psalm, though the word \u201cbomb\u201d strikes \u201cpsalm\u201d with too much force to give the speaker her much-needed \u201ccalm\u201d at current\u2019s end. This requires one more poem, a sonnet with a dangling invocation, meant in earnest this time: \u201cO Holy People.\u201d Here the speaker asks to be relieved of her \u201ctelestial state,\u201d the lowest degree of heaven in Latter-day Saint cosmology. She is willing to wait. She knows she \u201cfall[s] too easily to shards, a hand\/ left to wane ungathered.\u201d<\/p>\n This poet\u2019s skill in holding shards makes Rain Scald <\/em>an essential addition to the growing gathering of Native stories told in their own words. Amid recent accusations of \u201creverse\u201d cultural appropriation in works like the Broadway musical Hamilton<\/em> (a position that misses the power imbalance precluding such a two-way street), and though Atsitty\u2019s use of \u201cwhite\u201d poetic forms may seem to others like an attempt to \u201cdismantle the master\u2019s house with the master\u2019s tools\u201d (Audre Lorde\u2019s still-resonant warning), these poems work as de-colonizing speech.<\/p>\n I will never hear \u201cJesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam\u201d the same way again, or write a villanelle without recalling Atsitty\u2019s cultural interrogations that unsettle that repetitive form. This poet knows several worlds well and moves among them on taut lines of story, song, and prayer. Many of these lines are difficult to forget, in the most literal sense of poetry as memorable language. They preserve a history of cultural and personal loss, of poisoned ground (\u201cIt was the water she drank, soaked in tailings\u201d), and of moments of blessing, often in the form of water, too, however fleeting in dry land.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Rain Scald: Poems <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The late Adrienne Rich once described her use of received poetic forms as \u201casbestos gloves\u201d for handling difficult material. In Tacey M. Atsitty\u2019s new collection Rain Scald (University of New Mexico Press), sonnet, sestina, and villanelle surface amid prose poems, columnar incantations, a concrete poem with white […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1643,"featured_media":42608,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2589,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/rain-scald.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 23:07:02","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1643"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42606"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42609,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42606\/revisions\/42609"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nOn TV, I\u2019d seen long-haired men<\/p>\n
\npie.\u201d One morning I found a cherry pie lying<\/p>\n
\nI knew he had been a bull rider<\/p>\n
\nI circled around her into his room.<\/p>\n
\nwhile she sobers up.\u201d I stepped over her<\/p>\n
\nwaiting for the salty smell to drown the house.<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Tacey M. Atsitty
\nUniversity of New Mexico Press
\n2018
\n88 pp.
\n$18.95<\/p>\n