Beyond the Noisy Membrane, Poems by Mary Imo-Stike

Mary Imo-Stike’s new book, Beyond the Noisy Membrane, is a unique contribution to modern poetry, reflecting her singular and important place in the world. For her, even the rocks “hold our stories,/broken and discarded pieces/of our lives.”  Imo-Stikes’s self-awareness is deeper than the babble we often encounter not only in social media and what passes for news but even in today’s literature. Her book is for people who want the hard impact of history on daily life. She asks to be buried “face down in Spring” so “I’ll embrace this earth/that holds the remains of my ancestors/who pushed seed deep with bony fingers.”

Beyond the Noisy Membrane is grounded in a Native American past still alive for her and, through these poems, for us. She feels the sting of lynching, the “noose still wringing my neck.” Although many of these poems hint at burial, rehearsals for a final act, Imo-Stike understand that our mortality highlights the joys to be found in simple acts, as in her poem When I Make the Bed:

I snap a crisp clean cover over

the carefully and freshly placed sheets,

and watch it float down and settle

unwrinkled and ready to caress

our work-worn bodies with comfort,

with love and promise of sleep.

 —David Salner, author of the 2023 Portage Poetry Series title, The Green Vault Heist and Summer Words: New and Selected Poems and the 2021 novel

From the very first poem in this fine collection, Imo-Stike places us in a thin place where a moon resonates with a “loud neon” Coca-Cola sign, places us in a unique yet quite verifiable “here!” This notion of place, this here is critically important and revelatory for many of these superb poems, a here with “rounded river rocks, like bread loaves rising.” That place should be so central is, of course, not surprising for a poet who proudly claims native ancestry. Among the many places in these poems are places of death and erotic attraction, places from which stories are born and re-told, places that fuel a desire for the “here” beyond “the noisy membrane” of life rushing by, a desire for the “real and wild that lives on here.” For myself I know I’ll be making a place for these lovely poems here on my very own shelves.

–Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia and winner of the Blue Lynx Prize for Woman in Red Anorak