Tree Surgeon by Alecia Beymer – NWVS #181

Alecia Beymer is a poet who creates a new language replete with reverberations of philosophy, mystery, love and longing. In “Tree Surgeon,” a speaker navigates the loss of a literal and metaphorical home, the loss of a father, and, more broadly, fissures that attempt to break us internally; fissures that attempt to distance us from others. Here is a music that rumbles through fields like a tractor, a landscape of tree limbs “lit/with icy sweaters,” “a horse gasping oats/ from your flat palm.” Listen, look, feel, and you will find Beymer’s first collection like “that lamp left on,/a reminder/that we are alive.” I feel tremendous kinship with this poet and her poems, and, somehow, a little less alone in the world. You, too, will find a friend in Beymer, one who captures essence, who magnifies the human experience, and who offers gentle guidance: “If a tree dies, plant a new one,/maybe two.”

–Janine Certo, author of O Body of Bliss, winner of The Longleaf Press Book Prize

What can be made of a grieving body attached to its loss? What is home for a body longing to be held? Alecia Beymer‘s poignant Tree Surgeon moves us through the precarious terrain of childhood where solace is found in nature, especially trees. These poems remind us that excavating painful roots can form fresh systems of belonging and new senses of home. They remind us of the power of reaching, with longing, for the land we come from, for the moments that have held us. Tree Surgeon is both testament to a chronic illness of living with loss and an elegy to unyielding desires. “Give me more than I know to ask for.” I am grateful for Beymer’s clear, vulnerable voice that isn’t afraid to call out “like loss, like two hands unclasping.” This collection brims with heart and wisdom.

–Maya Pindyck, author of Impossible Belonging, winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry