by Joanna Acevedo
July 5, 2022
Joanna Acevedo (she/they) is the Pushcart nominated author of the poetry collection The Pathophysiology of Longing (Black Centipede Press, 2020) and the short story collection Unsaid Things (Flexible Press, 2021). Her work has been seen across the web and in print, including in Hobart Pulp, Digging Press, and the Write Launch. She is a Guest Editor at the Masters Review and Frontier Poetry, Associate Poetry Editor at West Trade Review, Reviews Editor for the Great Lakes Review, and received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2021. She is supported by Creatives Rebuild New York: Guaranteed Income For Artists.
Mothman Apologia by Robert Wood Lynn; Yale University Press; 120 pages; $20.00
When I first encountered the “Ten Elegies for Fire and Oxycodone,” as a participant in a student-run writing workshop in the summer of 2020, during the first year of the pandemic, I knew I had come across something significant and special. As the cornerstone of Robert Wood Lynn’s Mothman Apologia, winner of the Yale Younger Poet’s Prize in 2021, these eleven poems cut through the smoke and flame and sharply address the opioid epidemic, personal crises about growing up in rural West Virginia, and deep feelings of grief and loss.
The collection is built around the “Elegies” and poems about the “Mothman,” a West Virginian folklore tale about a cryptid that haunts the woods, a red-eyed, birdlike figure which, in these poems, may represent Lynn himself or his lost friend, but is handled with wonderful tenderness as he blunders through life in poems like “The Mothman Gets High” and “The Mothman Watches A TV Movie and Resolves To Steal The Declaration Of Independence.” Woven through this collection are questions about the nature of language — “Appalchia doesn’t/ rhyme with euthanasia any more than Eurydice rhymes with cowardice,” questions about the way that we think, “Yes. There is a point at which any person gets tired/of knowledge… I’ll tell you this:/ I’ve never felt further from another than when/ standing beside them trying to point out a star,” and plain, honest grief. Lynn is capable of incredible beauty, incredible terror, and incredible depth, moving from one to the other from line to line, showing a soft underbelly and then immediately turning to calloused scar tissue in the next motif. These poems are gripping and magical, and to see them grow and change is surely a privilege.
Lynn mixes the personal with the universal, in poems like “Fourth of Ten Elegies for Fire and Oxycodone,” where he explores the concept of backfiring, when firefighters light small fires in order to put out larger ones. He states, “when they teach you a thing until you stop wanting to learn,” and then, later in the poem, “how a mouse problem becomes a snake problem if you let it go long enough.” The metaphor becomes literal, as he explains how he learned backfiring himself, digging holes in the ground and setting them alight, learning a skill that would not serve him later in life except in poetic form. The centrifugal force of the poem spins wildly, moving from the Sackler brothers, who exacerbated if not created the opioid crisis in America, to the wildfires in Shenandoah, which could be seen from space. The elegy, typically a lament for the dead, comes to fruition in these poems, which are not quite prose poems due to their unconventional spacing. They are fractured, broken, and breathless, and we read them with conviction and concentration like hiccups.
Other poems are purely personal, with no mention of the greater political sphere, and perhaps this is where Lynn really hits his stride—in “Augury,” Lynn says, “As a child, I loved/to take refuge from a downpour in the deep/end of the pool. Practiced hiding/from something by immersing myself in it.” This revelation, like many in the collection, has the quiet obviousness of all the best poetry—you recognize it immediately, and curse yourself that you had not thought of it first—but Lynn pulls this off and many like it with ease. Many of his lines are about hiding in plain sight, taking refuge, cloaking yourself in something; be it language, love, or even simply the dark clutch of a thing that is bad for you. There is danger lurking in between the lines of these poems, an unspoken warning. Be careful, they are saying. This happened to me, and it could happen to you, if you do not watch out.
Tackling the opioid crisis in the Southern United States is not easy, but Lynn does so with grace, even as he claims in “The Mothman Leaves The Used Car Lot Empty-Handed” that “This is what I meant when I told you I had/trouble choosing grace. I want to, I do.” Rather than stringing the reader along with facts and statistics, Lynn chooses the poetic route—moving slowly through years of memories, sifting through language and time, using his own experiences as a well to draw from, and he creates a well-rounded picture of the grief and loss that has devastated the region. His rendition feels poignant and necessary.
The “Mothman” poems act as a welcome respite from the punchy bursts of the “Elegies,” they are often more spaced out, with room to breathe between the lines. The language is often stunning, with lines such as, “Does it have to be true, that everything/we touch, we break a little?” We feel acutely for the Mothman, this cryptid who may or may not exist. We feel his pain and his anguish, we care for his existential questions. These poems are some of the loveliest in the collection, for the way they make a nonhuman entity feel so human.
The varying forms and structures of these poems all serve the speaker in different ways. The “Elegies” are almost like prose poems, with strange spacings, and we read them in staccato bursts, almost as if the writer pushed them out in concerted bursts. They are painful to read, and were almost certainly painful to write, full of moments of anger and tenderness; “I lost the difference 
between balm and blame pressed complicit into/complacent.” These elegies are interspersed with more traditional, longer block poems, in a more personal style, telling of the author’s childhood and then adulthood in West Virginia, dealing with themes of family, love, and nature. Throughout all these forms, there is still more room to breathe, with short poems beginning each section, empty space between each word, deeply introspective poems under the Mothman heading, which bring us revelations such as, “You should know I was not the first/to think the word forgive implied an/exchange, a deal.” The three styles come together cohesively to create one finished work, a varied and intense collection which speaks to a variety of emotions, spaces, and issues.
between balm and blame pressed complicit into/complacent.” These elegies are interspersed with more traditional, longer block poems, in a more personal style, telling of the author’s childhood and then adulthood in West Virginia, dealing with themes of family, love, and nature. Throughout all these forms, there is still more room to breathe, with short poems beginning each section, empty space between each word, deeply introspective poems under the Mothman heading, which bring us revelations such as, “You should know I was not the first/to think the word forgive implied an/exchange, a deal.” The three styles come together cohesively to create one finished work, a varied and intense collection which speaks to a variety of emotions, spaces, and issues. Grief rings throughout this collection. Lynn tells us, in the beginning of “Peepers in February,” that “It helps to think of longing as a fever/the body uses to rid itself of lonely./Sounds nice and like most nice things is wrong.” The unusual form of this poem and the repetition of the phrase “Sounds nice” helps drive its message home. Longing is more than a fever, and grief is blinding this speaker; loneliness is everywhere. But still, in between these “muffled warnings,” as Lynn says in “(The Mothman Reads from The Book of the Dead),” there is still a little hope. Lynn begs us to look at things differently.
This book was born out of loss, but its final poem, “The Mothman Gets Clean,” holds a message of hope. Perhaps this is what Lynn is trying to tell us—that there is hope for the Shenandoah Valley, that there is hope for us all. Isn’t that what artists do? They make us believe that there is some sense to this senseless world, some light in the darkness? This book is a light in the darkness, a pinprick in the cave blackness ahead of us, some shred of hope to hold onto late at night. A wonderful debut, and I can’t wait to see what Lynn does next.
©2022 West Trade Review
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A Pinprick in The Cave Darkness: Review of Mothman Apologia by Robert Wood Lynn
POETRY REVIEW
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