BOOK REVIEW

Tracks
Poems by Lynn McGee
(Broadstone Books, 2019)
Reviewed by Gerald Wagoner

New Yorkers who ride the subway daily to commute, or irregularly for millions of other reasons, tend to look down. They look down at phones, at books, or at the floor. They tend to cancel out their surroundings with headphones. The subway is not the their living room, unless they are the poet Lynn McGee; then it is “the room I live in ten hours / a week.” (“The Subway Car Is My Living Room”). If you are Lynn McGee, the first thing you tell the reader in your new book of poems, Tracks (Broadstone Books 2019), is: “Don’t forget to look up” (“Jackpot”). McGee’s poems explore our primal need to connect with others. More specifically, these poems deal with the untimely death of the poet’s sister, and the impact of her sister’s death on their father and on her sister’s children. Using language that is at once unadorned and sensual, these superbly crafted poems are distinguished by the poet’s love of the body, and by a remarkably tender regard for her subject.

The first poem of the book, “Jackpot,” with its refrain of “Don’t forget to look up,” immediately commands us to pay attention to our surroundings, and to be optimistic. The anaphoric “as” invokes the movement of trains and of lives. McGee, the ever observing poet, gives the reader the tired, the children, the wounded woman with a black eye who “…holds her mouth taut, / moves the red tube tenderly / over her lips.” The poems enters a mode of the potential, the contrafactual: “That could have been you… / You could have been that man…” then brings us back to the specificity of the factual and the real: “but instead you inhabit this body / you were born into….”

Nearly all of McGee’s poems are composed with an awareness of the body, a sense of inclusivity, and a tenderness that is both painful and compassionate. “Kid’s on a Train,” for example, begins with the body:

A teenage girl sits on the subway bench,
legs apart, pops her gum
and gazes up through false eyelashes
at another girl who stands
facing her, pushing those legs wider.

The physical tension of teenage sexual play between two girls, one with legs apart and one pushing wider, is complemented by two older women, one who

          …talks softly with her
partner in a V-neck sweater,
gold cross dangling deep
into her cleavage.

and by a “beefy kid sprawled on the bench.” We think we are in a world of difference, but the speaker quickly affirms a kind of inclusive commonality:

I’ve seen this all before.
I have been the girl popping her gum,
the older woman showing
the shadow between her breasts.
I’ve been the boy wanting to be
part of something that doesn’t
want him, and I’ve been the stranger
watching, unwatched.

Her compassionate solidarity with the lone boy wanting inclusion is echoed in “Woman’s Long Commute,” a poem about a transwoman that concludes, “She looks tired / like me”; and again, in “Headphones at Rush Hour”: “Everyone around me / does the same”; and in “Flashback,” where a man, “breath flammable / face crumpled with damage / that took years to amass” bolts out of the car when he awakes to discover he’s on the wrong train. The speaker describes how the man

feints and dodges through
the crowd, his younger self
emerges all cheekbones
and speed, showing me how.

“Autism, Children’s Ward,” one of eleven taut poems triggered by the accidental death of McGee’s sister, exemplifies the poet’s ability to balance what James Wright called “tenderness and horror” (in “The Stiff Smile of Mr. Warren,” a review of Robert Penn Warren’s book Promises, which appeared in Kenyon Review, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Autumn 1958), 645-55). The reader learns that the speaker’s nephew will not be home for Christmas because he is on suicide watch. She describes a boy tragically ignored:

Nurses turn their backs
when he drops his pants;
puberty, a bully come too soon,
hormones mean as marbles
on a slippery floor—he is falling,
fighting, his world tipped
since birth….

There are struggles “placating his terrible need / to hoard,” as well as with ill-suited schools and medical bills. On a visit, the speaker sleeps in the boy’s bed, and leaves him words of tender compassion:

a note—You have so many
Good books! I liked
Monster Trucks the best
I did not touch
your other things.

The images of boy’s “tipped” world speak for themselves, while the note from his aunt speaks directly to the boy who lives in that world.

There are many equally potent poems in this collection, wherein tenderness, for McGee, is the lingering soreness of wounds that were once raw. It is also the gentle empathy for “the things I notice / about strangers—it’s as if / we were once close” (“Details Heading Downtown”). Her love of clarity, and of the American language, guides us through our underworld with uncommon tenderness while she takes notes, as she says: “to wake myself / and write this life / into something I want” (“Waking on the Long Island Rail Road”).

Gerald Wagoner is a former Studio-in-a-School-Artist and New York City elementary and secondary English teacher. Born in Pendleton Oregon, he holds a BA in creative writing from the University of Montana, and a MFA in sculpture from the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). His artwork has been exhibited at The Drawing Center, The Queens Museum, and PS 1. In 2018, Wagoner received a six-month visiting artist residency at the Brooklyn Navy Yard (sponsored by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation). During this residency, he wrote a series of poems inspired by the Navy Yard’s history, and by the people who labored there. His poems have appeared in Right Hand Pointing. Wagoner has lived in Brooklyn since 1984.