in parentheses

Susan Ayres is a poet, lawyer, and translator. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in a wide variety of journals. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and teaches at Texas A&M University Law School. Her chapbooks are Walk Like the Bird Flies (Finishing Line, 2023) and Red Cardinal, White Snow (Main Street Rag, forthcoming 2024). Visit www.psusanayres.com.

Check out the book Some Inconvenient Poems available here!

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Some Inconvenient Poems is an exquisitely handbound edition of poems and artwork by Miles Liss. The book’s title alludes to the 2006 Oscar Award-winning documentary concerning global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, presented by former Vice-President Al Gore (dir. Davis Guggenheim). Like the film, this poetry collection is likewise a warning, but of much more than climate change. The message Liss delivers is dire and is summed up by the epigraph, “We blew it” (Wyatt to Billy, Easy Rider). Americans blew the ocean life and buffalo, the mountains and prairies, raped and pillaged the earth. Its gods are sports teams and money, oil and war.

            Comprised of twenty-nine illustrations and fifty-seven poems, Liss’s collection performs the work of a modern-day Whitman or fiery Biblical prophet, cataloging capitalism’s devastation of the Earth. As Liss writes in “Appalachia,” “someone had to toll the bell for progress” (9). Interspersed among the poems are primitive and colorful paintings and collages, which parallel the message and tone of the poems in the depiction of facial grimaces, grotesque beings, or titles that key us into the expressive juxtaposition between illustration and poem. 

            The collection surveys the history of America. Beginning with the prologue, “Go West, Young Man,” Liss declares that “The land had been conquered for no other reason than to conquer.” His poems seems to shout, look where Manifest Destiny has landed us. America is “a walking fortress filled with bars of gold. The breadlines grow longer” (“Halloween Morning” 32). America is “a hollow shell of capitalist culture gone awry” (“Anthem” 1), in which school children go on field trips to the Dollar Tree, as suggested by one illustration (“Dollar Tree” 10);  robber barons “send the common rabble to war” (“Land of the Robber Barons” 80); and undocumented immigrants are barely making it, denied basic human rights “to vote or have health insurance” (“Guapo’s” 66). The history Liss depicts is one of racism, war, lynchings, assassinations, segregation (“Americana” 78). In terms of progress, he rhetorically comments, “My argument with time / is that progress is relative. / Who’s to say we’re making it?” (“Progress” 27).

            The collection contains ecopoems showing how we have poisoned Earth with factory sludge and toxins, as the eight-line poem, “Plastic” emphasizes with its anaphora and repetition, in which one-third of the poem is the word “plastic” (17). Similarly, the powerful seven-part poem, “Fracking,” examines how Earth has been mined for “her black blood,” and how she has

              . . . coughed up a toxic amalgamation:
dead spirits, cowboys, railroad barons, oil tycoons,
Southern belles, nooses, heroin needles, laundry detergents,
aerial tv antennas, lunar modules, and a plastic tub
of Land O’ Lakes butter (21).

In this poem, when Earth “asked the Monopoly Man why he did what he did to her,” he responded, “‘Because you’re a woman!’” The poem ends with an allusion to the William Carlos Williams’ poem, “To a Poor Old Woman.” Rather than plums tasting good,  

Oil tastes good to them.
Oil tastes good
to them. Oil tastes
good to them (21).

William Carlos Williams’ poem, “To a Poor Old Woman.”

            In addition to ecopoetry, the collection contains poems of political engagement suggesting that wars are instigated for no seeming reason, racism is rampant, and America expresses disregard for immigrants, the homeless, and addicts. These themes appear throughout the collection, but collide in the poem, “Monuments,” which contrasts the majestic Washington Monument with dead soldiers, “homeless men // whose hands are swollen / like catcher’s mitts,” and fast-food workers who are “Central American teenagers” (38).

            This is a book of isolation, despair, and alienation. Liss walks “on a sacred pilgrimage,” but encounters “a broken country” (“On the Banks of the Ohio” 75). Despair “has settled / in my stomach like a polluted lake” (“Flowers” 77). This collection does not claim that it will save the Earth, but serves as a lyrical warning of the complexity of problems plaguing existence.

            Yet, this is also a book containing glimmers of hope. Although Liss imagines a dystopian end of the world, the poem “Biospheres” asks, “Will there be love? / Of course, there will be love” (13). The situation may ultimately not be hopeless. The book’s final two illustrations are of simple flowers and a butterfly, suggesting nature’s impetus to continue. The final poem finds solace in “[t]ravel by foot,” into the speaker’s own garden where human, animals, and Earth experience wordless communication, in which the speaker and birds observe and “speak” to one other, even though “[t]hey don’t understand the / words, but have no difficulty / with the meaning,” in which “[l]ines connect us” (“Topographies” 82-83).  

Some Inconvenient Poems by Miles Liss

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