Review of
Creature, Wing, Heart, Machine
by L.S. McKee

Reviewed by Danielle Hanson

Creature, Wing, Heart, Machine is L.S. McKee’s first collection of poetry, and it is a marvelous debut. The pacing is measured, building tension and suspense. The writing is clean and the imagery accessible. In short, it was a pleasure to read.

The book consists of a series of persona poems of a speaker named Alva. Persona poems allow a writer to distance themselves from the speaker. We can never assume the writer is the speaker in any poem, but persona poems give a way for the writer to explicitly not be the speaker. Except, McKee puts a chink into this façade in the early poem “The Birth of Alva,” where she says:

Alva is and is not me. Sometimes

I’m tired of walking around in the same

ole body, under the same

foam-ceilinged sky

or the too-blue August one

with its nagging sun . . .

I wanted Ava to be born in 1914.

So far back in history,

it had nothing to do with me. . .

so here’s the truth. Alva is and isn’t

me. She was born

in 1979. . .

before

the internet and the phone

Alva uses as both a compact and companion:

checking her red lipstick,

right before she tries again,

seeing how she’s drawn between the lines

without looking. To see how close she is

to bleeding through.

 
McKee is playing with self like she plays with the construct of a persona poem. She has a wit and intelligence that makes this book engaging and fun to read. The speaker’s voice is calm and in charge, lyrical, above the action.

McKee’s poems, like the title, examine multiple imagescapes, one of which is the human. In “Alva’s Anatomical Heart,” the heart “paces uneasy hours” like a nervous woman about to board a plane. In “Lonesome Thing,” the heart “has not hit the bottom of its well.” While the heart in these poems is a metaphor for feelings of the speaker, it’s also an anatomical heart with veins circulating blood through a human body.

Similarly, in “Alva and the Sculpture of a Vanishing Woman: First State,” a statue is described, which fully transgresses into the human sphere at the mention of her “spleen that filters.” The human space of this book is a space of body and guts. Anatomical bits reflect emotional states, as in the poem “Alva on Getting Dumped in the Desert.” The heartbreak of the dissolution of a long-standing relationship is prefaced with:

the air gave her
nosebleeds: blood suddenly on the

sofa pillows—a few drops that would
never wind their way back to the heart.

 
The collection begins with this heartbreak and continues through Alva’s search for connections. She explores online dating and eventually finds new romance. The love here is not idealized. The speaker is lonely throughout most of the book and dissects her own fantasies of love.
Another imagescape throughout the collection is the animal. The heart in “Lonesome Thing” is a human heart, but it has “Velvet muzzle, wet nostril” and is a “beloved thing that kneels and drinks.” The poems are populated with moths, fish, unnamed beasts “circling the house” and chewing holes in the sun, sea creatures devouring rotten shipwrecks.

As Alva finds new love and peace in the later poems, we find the poem “Domesticated Animal” that “comes around, / to rest its head // by your ear” and the poem “Tender Creatures” that “hum and bellow / of what loves and breaks and loves and—” The animals in this collection interact with Alva and contrast the human, but also amplify the human. They are the Other, a reflection in a pond. Whereas the humanscape deals with guts and complicated relationships, the animalscape is softer and wilder.

A third main imagescape of the collection is science and the machine. Throughout the book, poems invoke the water cycle, physics, biology, astronomy, medical technology and terminology. Scientists look for the God particle in two separate poems, and in “Alva and the Complex Pool,” McKee gives us the lines:

One rule of nuclear physics:

in collapse there is light. Energy, like a rejected lover,
has to go somewhere. To stay is an impossibility.

 
Humans use science to search for human answers in these poems. And sometimes machines answer those searches. In “Alva Wants to Open the Spam Email Because the Subject Says ‘My Dear’” a:

. . . bot gone

rouge from its algorithmic     cage of lovelessness.
A machine learned            on all the lonesome data
until it                 couldn’t help but feel it knew her.

 
As we find in earlier poems describing online dating, technology stands in for human connection. The spam email poem concludes “we’re all machines hungry to be opened.”

Each of the imagescapes in Creature, Wing, Heart, Machine is interesting and does solid poetic work. But it is the merging of these themes, in the title and in the poems, that make this book greater than a collection of poems. The intersection shows a truth about the human condition. The heart as animal; machines examining humans; the human as machine. That melding, along with the transparency in the relationship between the speaker and the poet (“Alva could only add up to anything but me”), magnify the speaker’s vulnerability in light of the narrative, making Alva a speaker we trust in her openness. She knows herself and sees her situation clearly. McKee has written persona poems that ring true emotionally. This is McKee’s debut collection, but there is the promise of so much more to come.

Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 4.

See all items about Danielle Hanson
Visit Danielle Hanson’s contributors page.
See all items about L.S. McKee
Visit L.S. McKee’s contributors page.