The Wishing Tomb by Amanda Auchter (review)

The city of New Orleans, a lapping song from the throats of its inhabitants spanning hundreds of years; their wishes call out from the tomb and the present, and for the hopeful future. This collection by Amanda Auchter, The Wishing Tomb, opens in 1697 with people coming to the land below the lip of water, "this slow tongue that collects / in hill and dale," and with people who "have imagined what we will come to, what land will claim us." Who are these people? These are all the people of New Orleans—explorers and slaves, new brides and tourists, herbalists and healers, mistresses and nuns—who press themselves "into the shredded seams, / sandbag the breach" as the levee breaks in 1816, who search "through the ashes for the city // its bowl of paper / crushed and wrought" by the fire of 1788, who remove leaches from those with yellow fever to bowls as the "mosquito dabs the water" during the American Plague in 1853 that killed thousands. What would any people do when faced with tragedy? Auchter's poem answers:

we have long practiced

disaster. We do not hide in our beds and closets,close a door, a mouth. We do notsay it will not come. It will come.

But because there are healers in this city, Auchter offers balms: "let fever become // lavender blossoms" because everything becomes "transformed." She tells us "This I can cure" and shows a clear-eyed and calm silence of a people who "don't speak / of the rising river, fevers, how soon the damp / earth will shutter our eyes."

Part 2 of The Wishing Tomb moves through the next one hundred years of New Orleans's history, giving voice to performers and musicians like Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong's mother, Fred Staten, and the burlesque dancer Evangeline Sylvas. Whereas part 1 gives accounts of slave ships, slavery, and the auction block, part 2 offers snapshots of resistance—Homer Plessy riding a whites-only railcar and Rudy Bridge enrolling in an elementary school where only white students attend. Here, too, there's no lack of disaster and cultural violence—segregation, blue books in the red light district, domestic violence, murder, hurricanes—and also there's prayer. The title poem, a poem on Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau's vault in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2, tells us "Give me what you wish" and "I will show you want you've earned" because "everything // becomes possible." What is this possibility? In The Wishing Tomb, Auchter's answer is love.

The final section in Auchter's new book offers New Orleans in the millennium, which is in many ways the story of Katrina, the aftermath of Katrina, and an open prayer for that trauma. The poem "Wind Prayer" opens, "tell me how to speak to suffering, where / to toss the slivers of a body already broken." Here we have the hurricane during which the city floats "past with its shattered glass, shoes, telephone wire." Yet Fats Domino is pulled from the ruin of the ninth ward and artist Ellen Montgomery, who refused to leave as the hurricane approached, collects roof tiles to fill her pockets "with black slate, these chipped / relics. In my hand, I painted this / ruin into a strip of starlight." The poem "Prayer at Saint Rock Cemetery" makes a plea to "heal this troubled picture, this city / of static and camera flashes. This / flowerless and crumbled grave." Perhaps the poem that best illustrates Auchter's willingness and ability to expose the complex feelings about the impact of this hurricane on those who are "bystanders" to its ravages is "Grey Line Katrina Tours," in which she explores the complicated way we experience disaster when it is not in our own city by presenting a bus for New Orleans visitors who want to see as tourists a Katrina beyond what was offered on tv and the Internet. Auchter admits, "I am no better at this" because "Part of me wants to see // the weight of so much disaster," "Part of me wants to" watch...