The Smell of Good Mud by Lauren Zuniga (A Review by Amye Archer)

92 pgs/$15

On the back cover of Lauren Zuniga’s The Smell of Good Mud, poet Andrea Gibson writes, “Dear Lauren, it is impossible to read your book without falling in love with you.” I say, too late. I fell in love with Lauren Zuniga before I read her book. I fell in love with Lauren Zuniga in a small theater in downtown Scranton two weeks ago. I fell in love with Lauren Zuniga when she opened her mouth to read and her whole life fell out. We learned about her home, her children, her childhood, her loss, her love, and everything in between. This poet is so intimate with her audience, I almost want to set her a place at my Christmas Eve dinner.

So when I opened The Smell of Good Mud, I half-suspected I would love the words between the covers, and Zuniga did not disappoint. The strength in Zuniga’s work is her hard-fought language. She makes puzzles from words, scrambled eggs with social norms. Her images kaleidoscope across the page and spring to life over and over again like an eternal fountain of nouns and verbs. In “Dear Lemon Engine,” she paints the physicality of her grandmother:

My grandmother’s hands don’t work anymore. They are twisted seashells. She keeps every ex-husband on her back. Secretaries. Stillborn babies. Dried up milk. Keeps them in the floppy pockets of her nightgown. Let’s them gnaw on her bones. I don’t want to be crippled.

In “Gas Station Vodka,” she surprises with language again:

We will need a room full of compasses and stopwatches. Otherwise, we will have no idea where we are or how long we’ve been there. We will say Thanks every time we leave the bathroom. We will drink, gossip, and curl lips like old people who don’t give a damn about anything because they are old. But we won’t ever get old. We will get artistic. We will get Grand Canyon and shoreline.

If imagery and language are the sea on which Zuniga’s poems sail, then her ability to reach the shared human experience is the boat in which she rides. The Smell of Good Mud is the journey of a young woman, an ex, a mother, a daughter, a lover, but most of all it is a collection of pebbles we all keep under our mattress to remind us we are connected to something greater. In “Stormchaser,” a beautiful poem written for the poet’s sister, we are reminded of the familial bonds and the elasticity with which they are constructed:

Tonight when she was fighting the police officer, her mouth was a goblet of hurricanes, I wanted to tell her

Kait, not every storm is worth chasing. Sometimes you have to take shelter. Build the house yourself. Let their answers beat on you like hail on a snare drum but you just keep thumping out your song. You’re the only one who knows it, You chose this body and this life and this family like we chose you and I promise we’ll quit trying to change you if you’ll quit trying to leave us.

Hearing Zuniga read this poem aloud was like watching an empty cloud fill up with rain. The emotion in her voice was exactly as strong as it is on the page and that’s what makes this poet fresh and good, and terrifying, all at the same time. I will leave you with some lines from my favorite poem in the collection, “Boston Marriage”:

There are no fathers in my family. Only men who marry mothers. Men who leave mothers. Sometimes I think if a man could hold me hard enough it would make my grandmother feel wanted.

Lauren Zuniga can out word me, you, hell, all of us. She is a true wordsmith. Don’t just buy The Smell of Good Mud, gather it up and plant it in your garden, line your shelves with its words, sprinkle some in your laundry. The more these poems spread about your life, the better you’ll be.

Amye Archer teaches, writes, and mothers. All at the same time. Visit her at www.amyearcher.com.