All Our (Un)Makings by Ali Beheler

Ali Beheler has received the Milton J. Kessler Memorial Prize from Harpur Palate Literary Journal and the Editor’s Prize from Spoon River Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, The Penn Review, Rogue Agent, The Shore, Stone Circle Review, ballast journal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies from Sundress Academy for the Arts and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. She teaches at Hastings College in Hastings, NE. Website: www.alibeheler.com, Instagram: @alibeheler

 

PRAISE:

 

“What happens when we imprint into the vision of another, a vision that we created at the feet of our own desire? In All Our (Un)Makings, poet Ali Beheler turns towards language to explore the sorrow of enmeshment and the necessary act of self-excavation. For Beheler, a reexamination of poetic and philosophical lineage proves as critical as it is beautiful. From torrin a. greathouse to Anne Carson, from Penelope and her loom to the act of revision, myth and word theory create the ultimate archeological site for the digging out, subtracting, taking away / the residue of day-after-day, /of otherwise-disposed, /the elsewhere …. Beheler understands how to use the pen as a trowel and use it well; each poem is crafted with the page and reader in mind. Here you will find form—the form of body and poem—taking its rightful place as the holder of all that we need like a womb: soft of bone whose inner skin /makes blood. / Son of song. / Stanzas held up to air.”

–Kelly Gray, author of Dilapitatia (Moon Tide Press, 2025)

 

Ali Beheler’s poignant All Our (Un)Makings is very wise about how mental concepts can obscure reality. In Beheler’s hands this becomes a fraught erotic wrestling match with very high stakes. These poems seem to take place in a haunted series of predicaments slightly outside of material reality, as if one could watch Orpheus and Eurydice pause for a meal in a restaurant somewhere between life and death. In one of the book’s keenest moments, the version of herself that the speaker constructed according to an understanding of what the beloved desired now threatens to usurp the actual self—“in my seat but just/a little to the side…the better one, /the slightly better me.” In a sense, these poems are an elegy for reality itself, because the speaker’s mind full of fractally-proliferating selves, others, and beloveds creates a nearly un-navigable universe of signs, emanations, and sensations. The good and bad news: there’s no separation, but there’s also no discernment, which requires a degree of distance. Life here is like one of those Son et lumière shows where cruising tourists watch and listen as sound and light are projected on artifacts of the “real world,” perhaps creating momentary intensities at the cost of understanding what or who is real. There’s a very old Japanese Buddhist poem on the topic “Mental Afflictions Are Themselves Enlightenment,” delivering the startling and hopeful message that the seeds of affliction are not different from the seeds of liberation. I’m grateful to Ali Beheler for a report from this spiritual and psychological battlefield, in the form of such beautiful, troubled, and troubling songs.

–Patrick Donnelly, author of Willow Hammer, Little-Known Operas, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, and The Charge.

 

In Ali Beheler’s All Our (Un)Makings, language is both method and subject—the raft we lash together to move down the river and the river itself, the warp and weft out of which we, like Penelope, make and unmake the world. Brilliant, erotic, laden with grief and resolve, these poems weave (and unweave) voice and text, thinking and feeling, lover and beloved—tracing in precise, dazzling syntax the ways we limn and lose each other, wrung out, sung through, but / never reuniting, winding back onto the spool.

–Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet, author of The Greenhouse and Tulips, Water, Ash