The Cavalcade by July Westhale

The Cavalcade is a collection of poems that explores what we think about when we think about historical figures. Here, Virginia Woolf explores a rich, inner-personal life—goes to the grocery store, shows desire, considers the literary canon, reimagines her own suicide. Here, the Chilean dictator Pinochet is given the opportunity to consider his actions from inside his casket. Weaving together personal narrative with global events, The Cavalcade truly is a processional of a different sort.

July Westhale‘s poems are bedded with surprise in the way dreams are-you think you know where they’re going and then they turn, suddenly, and you’re out of your depth, dazzled, terrified, wonderstruck and wholly absorbed by the singularly new and original place in which you find yourself. Her journeys into the dark woods of memory-her own and that of others, from Pinochet to the Donner Party to Virginia Woolf-yield poems in which the uncanny is anchored in the everyday, the political bleeds into the personal, and in which generosity and grace are buoyed by intellectual rigor, resulting in nothing less than a wholly original poetic cosmology that retains an essential capacity for wonder and horror in equal measure.

–Pamela Petro, author of Sitting Up With The Dead

Here, Sigmund Freud meditates on a photograph of his mother. Virginia Woolf, distracted at the corner market, drops a handful of eggs, which smash to the ground “like noisy yellow protests in the spice aisle.” Pinochet, uncomfortable and despised in his casket, announces that “not a leaf moves in this country without me knowing.” July Westhale’s poetry is witty, frightening, and lovely all at once. Her subjects are broad and ambitious: the vagaries of erotic love, the peculiar hold of literature and history over our lives, the complexities (and anxieties) of gender. She approaches them with intelligence, startling imagery and surprising, nuanced music. This is a terrific debut collection from a poet at the beginning of a promising career.

–Kevin Prufer, author of Churches

July Westhale thinks and feels in images, and writes a kind of multicolored poetry that’s not afraid to cast light on our darker-indeed, our dirtier-impulses, as in “Poem in Which I Rewrite History,” whose speaker and partner contemplate attending church, but “instead end up fucking// execution style: gruesomely. . .” In the world these poems inhabit, with its “great old ghosts grousing on stairwells,” bedtime stories neither lull nor comfort, but rather shock us alert via the charge of Westhale’s restless metaphors. I’ll never drop some eggs again without thinking of “their noisy yellow protests.” But if her style is prismatic, her central subject is as direct as desire in its many semblances. One beautiful poem ends with this plea: “Leave me hopeful for another. Waiter! Another.” And that’s how I feel after finishing this book.

–Steven Cramer, author of Clangings

The Cavalcade soars in Westhale’s stark, unforgiving images and narrative movements-as in “Ars Poetica” wherein the speaker imagines herself as two girls-one killing the other for her cloak and food “…she will pull the arrow back, and shoot it/ into the throat of the hooded girl. She will retrieve the basket.” Her poems are each a kind of parable, rendered from the lives of Virginia Woolf and Freud, an examining room, the speaker in stirrups, to 1970’s Argentina. This small debut collection is one of revelation and revelry from a gifted new poet.

–Stephanie Glazier