From the poignant point of view of a daughter conceived with the purpose of providing a kidney for her older brother, Emily Schulten’s second full length collection of poems, The Way a Wound Becomes a Scar (Kelsay Books, 2022) is an odyssey of the body’s path through our world.

Its five sections are musical movements in poetry. The first, heftiest section centered around the donation provides a sort of thematic anchor around which the others turn: “Phantom Limb,” in section three, begins as a meditation of the titular phenomenon, then deftly weaves in the donated kidney from section one and lost love of section two:

I know my kidney is gone,
but sometimes feel my stomach contract and squirm
beyond the severed arteries, sealed fuses.
It’s this way at night, too, I find myself speaking
to you, certain you’re here, your hand slipping around
my left side, resting at the small of my back. I’m startled
when I remember none of this is real, there’s no touch.
I reach to pull the sheet toward my chin, but nothing
moves around me, the bed stays cold.

It is here where Schulten begins to dance, proving herself adept at the quick chord changes of point of view, in order to provide a fulsome account, or documentation, of trauma. The keen awareness of the body and the body’s plight extends through section four, a sequence of “rejection episodes,” in which a brother’s life hangs in the balance:

his blood tries
to rid itself of what’s
been sewed inside
and left like a candle
at a roadside shrine.

The stakes are high as hell. Where life depends upon the body and the body depends upon the success of a medical procedure, The Way a Wound Becomes a Scar keeps us breathless in suspense: Our brother’s body begins to “cape his new kidney in fibrous tissue.” How are we to understand this, in our brotherly concern? How keep our brother? The question is biblical and profound, a question of love. And beauty comes in “like the knotted linen of Egyptian dead,” our resolve to stay alive, no matter the answer, the fate of our brother.