Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen

On Goodreads, Kenzie Allen’s Cloud Missives already has has 60 reviews, averaging 4.33/5. A debut collection brings to mind juvenilia of someone young in craft, which this is not. This Haudenosaunee poet has a lot of high market publishing credits to her literary name already.

A missive would suggest a team inbox app or epistolary poems. It could riff off the “Missive of Cloud and Fog,” one of the side quests happening in Genshin Impact, a 2020 action role-playing video game. It allows the player to control one of four interchangeable characters to find the truth about their missing sibling and the fate of the lost kingdom of Khaenri’ah. That may or may not have not been the origin-point or intent but Allen does explore what was lost and what could become as an Indigenous person living beside and in a predominantly colonialist majority.

So far as her own origin stories, she has poems which are illustrative anecdotes. She recounts being a child presented with stereotypes by a teacher who ostensibly is the more educated in the room. How to relate self to stereotypical molds set out for you? How to break them. One of the five sections is fairy tale poem of Snow White. In the last section, “Love Songs,” she is at her most breathtakingly lyrical. Listen to how the poem “Whatever is the Matter” starts:

My thought at the collarbone:
how the skin carries its light.
One breathable membrane,
an onion, nerve-filled and luminous.

And yet this is not a study of light but contained anger after a fight. “how could I answer you/ with all this earth piled on my tongue,// your limbs just stripped of anger,” she asks. “could I cluster verbs into sardine cans/ and twist the lid back on.” The poetry flows and surprises with turns that makes it hard to sample just one line or poem.

She combines direct experience with the universal in asking what is membership, what joins and divides us? In “Central Nervous System”, she takes a wide view to start: “What we have lived though settles/ in the small axon, what we endure/ whipped along vertebrae/ all the way to curled toes/ We flinch, we feral, we shrimp around the radiator,” until all the intellectual knowledge of what’s happening in trauma narrows down past the bones and toes into simple diction at the end echoing Gwendolyn Brooks with a mantra of we, “We plead. We gather. We pray./ We beg the doctor for any diagnosis./ We therapy./ We learn to walk again. / We identify the injury by the swelling.” Her choice to make stubby closed sentences is interesting, so the “We” looks more like a proper noun, a name for all of all, instead of running together in commas. It commands attention. Like the use of therapy as a verb not an object of the subject. A little grammatical firmness of intent there.

Especially in this last section she speaks with a compelling passionate force. Consider “Quiet as Thunderbolts”, where she starts “And I get it from you like a kill, / my name, my legacy, my shoulder chip/ and the small hollow beneath// where I can be wounded.” Again, she has returned to the idea of passing as settler but shows the cost of hiding and glimpses of how the built world appears, what is her domain and what is not (in Lisbon “so much landscape I can’t tend to.”) Evocatively she leaves for us to interpret “Namegiver,/ how she made me darker/ with her words.” By being given an Indigenous name, one becomes more part of the community and folded into the history, more “authentic” in the messy context of blood quantum and people questioning membership of who qualifies. “Darker” in this sense a positive, being marked by a name. But with the act of claim and being claimed you accept all the historical shadows and own the current micro-aggressions. It is a more complex place to stand whereas in earlier poems such as “Red Woman”. Here is less nuance, but a calling out of being told to be connected to her past by washing her braids in a river, to be a sex object, of her identity reduced to one of a list of lost girls. Like a boy who calls the cops “tells them/ his own description. I tell you, that’s despair.”

She refuses to confine her poems to poems of outsider-chosen Indigenous topics but includes her whole self and observations within her keen music. In “Ode to the Lookouts and Lighthouse Keepers,” she turns out one sweet line and pause after the next. It all hooks forward in a way that makes it difficult to extricate a stand-alone segment to give as an example, but try this on for ear:

“when to watch, wait, notate ascertain
azimuths, and distance and peril, Most days,
nothing happens. You wake at dawn
and the tower is patient. You take up your tasks. A simple life is all you’ve been seeking
and here it is— make coffee, clean the windows,
scan the horizon, now and and again.

It’s a book with a changing music that bears rereading well. She has an ear for sound and an eye for salient telling scenes.

Kenzie Allen is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, Boston Review, Narrative, The Paris Review’s The Daily, Best New Poets, Poets.org, and other venues. Born in West Texas, she now shares time between Toronto, Ontario; Stavanger, Norway; and the Oneida reservation in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Publisher: Tin House (August 20, 2024)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 96 pages
ISBN: 9781959030607

Pearl Pirie

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Pearl Pirie's WriteBulb is now available at the Apple store. A prompt app for iOS 15 and up gives writing achievement badges. Pirie’s 4th poetry collection was footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures(Apt 9 Press, 2021), minimalist poems, won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. Forthcoming chapbooks from Catkin Press and Turret House. Find more at www.pearlpirie.com or at patreon.com/pearlpiriepoet