Alyse Knorr’s Ballast, part of the Rane Arroyo Series (Seven Kitchen Press, 2019), is a collection of intimacy. Intimacy with place and women. Intimacy with speaker and reader. In the growing, diverse sea of queer poets, Knorr’s collection distinguishes itself with tight inventive language: “If I could marry / you, I would marry you in a river full of gold.” Every moment is tender. Knorr invites the reader home in “My Wife and I Debate the Sincerity or Lack of Sincerity in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Filling Station.’” She writes, “I once kissed her inside of a glacier; I once kissed / her inside of a whale.” This is a collection my young queer self desperately needed. While reading, I found myself wishing someone would have handed this book to me at nineteen; I had Ani DiFranco instead (thank you Monica!).

I would be doing this book a disservice to define the intelligent and heartbreaking work as only a collection of queer poems. In many ways, Ballast is collection rooted in place. Knorr begins with “Rabbit Lake Trail.” This poem situates us in Alaska and introduces an unnamed “you”: “I thought only of how I might describe you to myself / in another year. Which details might remain.”  From the beginning, we are introduced to the complicated heart of the collection. Knorr writes, “We tell ourselves: do not romanticize the landscape. / Yet, there, in the glacial-carved basin, spruce gave way / to scrub and tundra and the willows began to heal themselves.”  In Ballast, dualities are true simultaneously. 

Nineteen year old me needed to read, “I begin and begin,” Knorr’s long form interpretation of a sonnet. The poem begins: “My mother wants to know how I know.” What follows is 14 sections of free verse that juxtaposes images or memories or imaginings of closets with memories of a first love named Ruth. Section 2 puts us in the childhood bedroom closet. Section 4 is one simple sentence: “A closet is a small inner room.” We see snapshots of camp, Ruth’s joking father, and descriptions of the childhood closet. Knorr writes of Ruth, “To look inside her is first to see / an intricate system of muscle . . . and to look / even further is to see chains / of axons holding hands, / linked by gulfs and chasms, / doing what they must to set her on fire / when another woman touches her.”  This poem ends at camp: “we ran into the murk red river / with all our clothes on . . . she laughed and laughed and we felt so relieved.” The lesson of this poem is that hope and laughter and relief all live mixed together with the closet where the speaker is “naked and . . . writing.”

In Ballast, we are in Knorr’s glaciers and childhood bedroom closet. We are pulled into bed to lie with her, to hear the “origin story” she struggles to find a language for in “Self-Portrait.” And we see our own stories reflected in the “lucid cellar of [her] mind.” While Knorr missed the window to help young me, I am grateful to have her book in my hands now. Ballast has joined my essential queer reading short list.

November 2020