Leading All Our Voices to Thrum: Amanda Moore’s Requeening

In Requeening, the 2020 National Poetry Series winner selected by Ocean Vuong, Amanda Moore uses the metaphor of the hive to examine the work we each must do to build, and rebuild, a life. A domestic hive is its own entity, humming with hidden, internal energies, yet it requires keeping—a steady, attuned involvement in the smooth running of its affairs. Requeening is thus a timely and fascinating tutorial in seeking a right balance between freedom and care. In the melodic first sentence of “Afterswarm,” this balance is off:

As for when my first bees knit themselves togetherin a single sovereign self and slunk over the fencein search of a truant queen, I couldn’t say—not with my own house to mind.

The stakes of such distraction in the handling of a hive—or a life—are mortally high, and the poem’s speaker learns her lesson, vowing in the final stanza, “I will be alive this time / to what swells and roils the colony. . . . I will heed.” In poem after poem, this is what the speaker does. And while it does not frame every poem in the collection, the hive as both object and emblem allows Requeening to be both grounded in embodied experience and at the same time on the wing through ideas of labor and responsibility, resistance and relationship, making and grieving.

Requeening moves fluidly through a variety of forms (predominantly free verse but including sonnets, haibun, lists, as well as a palinode, an elegy, an essay, and a postcard). Despite deft tonal shifts, the poems maintain focus, pointing to hives—and by extension to hearts, houses, bodies, relationships, and, of course, poems—as working containers. (It’s no coincidence that Moore is a careful reader of Philip Levine.) Moore’s speaker locates her “own begetting” in “the exhalations and plumes / of midwestern work.” Her daughter’s dreams are “work that can’t be done in the waking world.” Speaking both of spring and new grief in “Next Lines,” she firmly states, “it’s time / to help the season work its magic.” In “The Worker,” a splendid poem, a bee portrays its toil in and for the hive in words that could describe a healthy poem:

Each cell tidy and tight with brood,what’s mine nowis sunshine and breeze

a gyre of pleasure and labor within.

And while work in Requeening is fundamentally generative, it is not always pleasant or pretty. In “The Dead Thing” the speaker enjoins, “you house flies / and scavengers, you insects, mites, beetles, larva, / maggots and worms: do your work.”

Above all, in Requeening it is our human bodies that do the work of experiencing and of surviving experience. “Don’t talk to me of a god: / it’s not what saved me,” we are instructed in the Whitmanesque “Gratitude,” “I thank nothing / but my body / for this life.” As hive-like containers of life and their own source of deep knowing, bodies get respect in Requeening. Typical in its sharp-witted treatment of a lowly topic, “Haibun with Norovirus” demonstrates that a body’s work can even be funny, gross, and admirable all at once:

Just as I became accustomed to her new independence, the privacy, her one-word answers, the girl croaks “Mom!” early one morning from behind the bathroom door and I come to find her clinging to the lip of the toilet discharging a vomit so red and bright and brilliant it can’t have been made by the body, and I remembered the way, just before bed the night before and against my objections, she had upturned a bag of XXtra Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in her mouth. This vomiting is more than mere consequence, I can see, as her body works to purge itself entirely, throwing her head forward again and again.

At the end of “Calendula,” a gorgeous poem that visually links the orange flower, rings of fire, the sun, and her body during childbirth, the speaker remembers both matter-of-factly and in...