At its core, Remi Recchia’s Quicksand/Stargazing is about connection and transformation. While the poems in the collection often focus on subjects like trauma and the complex process of becoming oneself, they are undergirded by an overwhelming sense of tenderness. Really, the poems act as love letters and tributes to a beautiful romantic partnership through mentions of an accepted proposal, a passionate marriage, the desire for children, and imagining a long-awaited son. Even when discussing difficult subjects—surgery and medical intervention, complicated family dynamics, seeking acceptance—the poems return to two people intricately bound by love and comfort. This connectedness is woven throughout the book in lines like,

caressing my wife’s face

as she worries the kitchen clean.

--

I think I might not know

how to die without my wife nearby.

--

I adore you through bed-

sheets, through dinner, through trinkets

snatched like a magpie,

The poems seamlessly move from one shared intimacy to the next, and while there are many quiet, delicate moments in the collection, there is also a fierceness: a desire for the speaker to protect a precious, sacred relationship, to keep it safe from anything that might threaten it.

The poems in this collection are also a tribute to the body and to one’s embodied experiences. There are literal metamorphoses taking place as the speaker undergoes a female to male transition and works toward a life of sobriety. Readers experience the speaker’s dysphoria and transition through discussions of “needles, / vials, expired prescriptions,” public restrooms, binders, missing breasts, fading scars. In “Waking Up from Top Surgery in a Sparse Airbnb Living Room,” Recchia writes,

The hardwood floor

reflects my new watch, large

face swallowing wrist:

a reminder that I am a man.

My body now a map instead of a globe,

rivered with lines and incisions.

Heavy bandages and compression

protect my newfound flatness.

Following top surgery, the speaker experiences reminders of his identity, a recognition of the ways his body maps a transformation. This “newfound flatness” is actually a broadening and an opening up where the speaker can “rise / like a Lazarus in the heat of certainty” as if just-born, as if finally sure of who he is and who he can be. In the same way the speaker has discovered this “newfound flatness,” he has also uncovered the calmness of sobriety. In one poem, Recchia writes, “sober and still” as the speaker recalls a moment in bed with his wife. In another, he writes, “We’ll paint the sky-canvas / splotchy cow colors / accented with sober love.” Finally, he writes, “We would all / be silent & sober & still.” When juxtaposed with “Ghazal for a Business Trip” where words and phrases like “hungover,” “eyes / bloodshot,” and “reeks of vomit” are at the forefront, the move toward sobriety is an act of quieting, an act of love toward oneself.

Quicksand/Stargazing is a timely collection of poems that at once reminds us of the fear, loss, and grief associated with the COVID-19 pandemic while also conveying hope through relationships and the human experience—the beauty of togetherness, of tending to ourselves and to others, of accepting and loving the complexities of our identities. Recchia’s poems show us that our “scars are not / battle wounds, they’re the map to the fight in the shadow of the / valley of death that [we’ve] already won.”