THE MERCY OF TRAFFIC by Wendy Taylor Carlisle reviewed by Ren Powell

The Mercy of Traffic
Unlikely Books, 2019

Available on Amazon

I’m not done with this book. Don’t get me wrong, I have read it—cover to cover—but there is so much more for me to find. The poems in Taylor Carlisle’s book The Mercy of Traffic speak to one another. Images return in new contexts, and images are repeated almost like leitmotifs. Hats, for example, pop up unexpectedly as in “Parsing the Nolo Me Tangere” where Jesus wears a Piedmont farmer’s hat. And in the poem “Little Hats” which begins playfully (and unexpectedly) with a rhyme:

    Six million bats,
    less or more,
    remember, they
    are not little
    Draculas or
    airborne felt hats […]

But ends with the prescient lines:

     Still, we must
     be careful
     not to flip
     our chicken
     bones into
     their cool cave.
     Who knows
     where a disease
     comes from,
     anyway?

Though I am careful as a reader to avoid conflating the poet and the speaker, many of these poems taken together begin to feel like a memoir of sorts. The arc from childhood to adulthood, the locations shifting – though Southern always. From “Juke”: 

     […] As soon as Dolly Parton’s done
            Singing, I’m getting out of here
            But before that, I’m going over
            To the Union Five and Ten
            And lay my good name down
            On a new        red        skirt

There are striking images here that I believe will stay with me: 

Grackle/on the lawn, shiny as spoiled meat (“What I’d Missed: An Ozark Sonnet”)

I shelter in empty rooms and touch myself//to find another knot of madness (“Things Burn”)

In the hot kitchen, I learned to take a punch. (“Say Yes: An Ozark Sonnet”)

I long for carnage//and an armpit with some sweat in it. (“Ferrous”)

The collection is rich with images and the details of food, of foliage and bodies in heat.  There are twelve Ozark sonnets. From “Blossom: An Ozark Sonnet”

      […] In the south of my childhood, time passed
             like a platter of chicken. Grandma made 

             fried rashers of bacon and piles of pork chops and
             presided over the hugging and sassing and eating 

             and telling and pulling of sticker burrs […]

While all the sonnets are 14 lines, Taylor Carlisle doesn’t adhere to traditional forms. She pushes and plays forms. The long sentences of the prose poems create long lines across the page and a unique tension within the context of a collection that consciously uses white space in each poem.

A few of the poems focus on images alone, for example “Lust”: 

[…] never ask how it would be/to have a man//with his heart/on the wrong side of his chest […]

--while others ground the images in an explicit narrative. She’s created a nice balance for the reader, in terms of tempo and subverting expectations. The collection is so rich that the (ostensibly) personal aspects never take over in a way that feels self-indulgent. It never becomes a pure memoir in verse. There is so much more here.  

From WendyTaylorCarlisle.com:

Wendy Taylor Carlisle was born in Manhattan, raised in Bermuda, Connecticut and Ft Lauderdale, Florida and lives now in the Arkansas Ozarks in a house she built in 1980. She has an MA from The University of Arkansas and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the author of The Mercy of Traffic (Unlikely Books, 2019), Discount Fireworks (Jacaranda Press, 2008) and Reading Berryman to the Dog (Jacaranda Press, 2000.) Chapbooks include They Went to the Beach to Play (Locofo Chaps, 2016), Chap Book (Platypus Press, 2016), Persephone on the Metro (MadHat press, 2014), The Storage of Angels (Slow Water Press, 2008), and After Happily Ever After (Two River Chapbooks, 2003.) Her work appears in multiple anthologies.