An Exodus of Sparks (Wheelbarrow Books)

“Cherry has the will and the strength to shoulder her poems, but also the knowledge, courage, and music to sing them into the air.”

An Exodus of Sparks makes kindling of hard subjects. Cherry’s perceptive, intuitive, and radiant poems dare to burn. They marry their dead brothers, touch eviscerated animals, regender an Old Testament prophet, and shape the hand of the dead.

Some poets possess the rare ability to craft poems that not only engage the mind but also stir the heart, meeting both intellectual and emotional needs. We want the images to speak to us and the language to show us something new. Allisa Cherry is that kind of poet, and An Exodus of Sparks, is that kind of book. 

Cherry presents her creations with a palpable reverence. It’s uncanny the way that the poems show themselves through an almost detached gaze while holding on to tenderness and wonder. In theme, Cherry’s poems are liberated from what is lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy. They are uninterested in such qualities. They take long, hard looks at the self, choreograph knock-down-drag outs, and define grace in such ways you’ve never considered or seen. 

Praise the poet who writes an intimately pure poem about a girl who sees her father’s penis by accident. Praise the poet who addresses her teenage-body shame inflicted by her mother, while helping a stranger lift a poor, dead dog out of the street. Praise the poet who mourns her suicided brother, and her patriarch father, who died from radiation exposure. Praise the poet who stands in the face of abandonment, injustice, and “damage” with conviction and love and light.

In Bless the Damage, Cherry writes: “Now that time has nacred over / the rough edges of memory / I can say that you were a real beauty. / A shiner.” What better words to express how love, in hindsight, is like a bruise so impressive that it can be a source of personal pride. These poems are excellent art, scrappy yet refined.

Cherry finds the intersections where pain and ecstasy collide. A colorful vacation leads to cleaning an open wound in a hotel sink while thinking about peonies bleeding out on the counter. Throughout the book, the poet steers us toward such intersections like a skilled playwright, using friction and tension to force the figurative (and sometimes literal) enemies to center stage. 

Loan a poet The Bible, and you’ll get something else in return. References to Cherry’s upbringing in a rural religious community abound, particularly in the section of six sonnets working with the image of Moses, or a version of Moses. Cherry begins the section with a quote from Mormon scripture—the prophet Joseph Smith’s account of Moses after he fell from God’s favor to be “left unto himself.” The poems speak to the poet’s faith, personified, which she addresses as “my dear” and “my love.” In The Internment of the Body of Moses, Cherry writes: “Sweet faith, I don’t know who I am without you.” In reality, this might always be at least a little bit true—identity so intertwined (and co-dependent) with oppressive religion.

In other poems, the poet takes back the magic, so to speak. And sometimes, on the journey, the only survival tools you possess are the ones you have been given. 

In A Life / Mislaid, the poet relates the day her daughter, now grown and leaving home, to another leaving at a time in the poet’s life: 

“. . . Years ago
I dropped a whole religion. It fell 
from my grasp and splintered
to matchsticks on the basement floor.
Now I carry the bundle
and strike each one by one
to shine a path through the darkness.
The universe is not where I left it.
I can no longer find it without retracing
all those pinpricks left by the stars.”

It is a wonder how this collection of poems came to be. Is it possible that the poet has turned the indoctrination into mojo? Consider the power in this, how a woman beats a religion at its own game, using their own words: "The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth," wrote the mystic prophet, Joseph Smith.

Cherry has the mind for it—brilliant poetry, researched, careful studies of what happens to a family, a town and the people there, to the poor, the faithful, the addicted and afflicted, to women, girls, and mothers. Love is the impetus, the spark. Stories like this only make it this far when the teller survives to tell them. Like good pioneer stock, Cherry has the will and the strength to shoulder her poems, but also the knowledge, courage, and music to sing them into the air.