[REVIEW] Mysterious Acts by My People, by Valerie Wetlaufer

 

Mysterious Acts cover

Sibling Rivalry Press

87 pages, $14.95

 

Review by Molly Sutton Kiefer

 

Valerie Wetlaufer’s debut collection Mysterious Acts by My People is a flirtation, seeped in desire and violence, the two often tangled with one another in a fraught tryst.  Wetlaufer shows her poetic range within this collection, and somehow, the bulk of the poems ring as absolute truths, while donning personas and flights of fancy.  The opening poem of the collection contains a kind of thesis for the book: “I loved a girl / when I was a girl, // before I knew desire / could be used against me” (“Solitary Vice”).  Here we have situations and emotions battering against each other in four lines:  the thrilling potential of attraction opening into the range of ways this can be a punishment.

Her poems make authentic other lived lives through persona.  In the poem “Bad Wife Spankings,” she writes in declarative truths: “I am the archeologist” and “I rewrite myself.”  These imaginative acts by the poet allow the realm of experience to open up, to show the universal in human experience.  In a violent sequence in the second section, there is a poem called “Telling True,” where “I rattled on / & they put me away.”  Here it does not matter where the root of truth is, but that each poem is true—truly felt, truly mattering.  One self in “Conjugal Elegy” reflects, “My tongue traces / tattoos & scars” and “Tangled sand, uncomfortable / legs, wasted days spent memorizing the body / I’d soon share.”  This kind of single-bodied entity moving into communal selves is also explored in intense friendship, as in the prose poem “The Canyon”:  “Once my hair grew long.  You braided it together with your own.  A black & blonde plait held us together on the ground.  I put a pebble in your mouth.  You almost kissed me.”  There are no lines in the sand in this poetic world; instead, there are almosts and there are moments-after. Continue reading