The Environmental Revolution is Us by Carrie Nassif

I’d Rather Be Lightning
By Nancy Lynee Woo
Gasher Press
pp. 128

Nancy Lynee Woo has reduced the ratio of aching beauty, as compared to impending doom, down to the least common denominator and it is us. Her debut experimental poetry collection is innovative and eerie; it runs charming and deep and it. is. brutal. Her writing deftly defamiliarizes the common-place by parsing it in phrases which might look like unrelated facts and comments, fragmenting the narrative of her own observations. It is as if she helps us to sneak up onto our own, tired and apathetic perspectives so that she might re-acquaint the reader to the jarring-ness which social justice and climate disaster issues      should evoke. How else to compel an audience already so inured to the concept of “crisis” into joining her for the revolution?

Make no mistake, this is the primary intention of Woo’s collection. She builds a case for the “wrongness” of life-as-normal, with her very first poem, “Everyday Apocalypse” by describing the difficulty of keeping up with the many obligations of owning stuff, as in the first stanza, “The brown tree ring/inside the coffee mug/will not clean itself.” Other self-care and maintenance tasks the millennial voice of the speaker forgets to do are listed and then juxtaposed with an acute awareness of our own, much larger, complicity. “Sometimes I forget/about orangutans swinging/their fists at logging machines.”  

Consider this a sort of slipstream storm warning. And consider the rest of the book the lightning strike that ignites a whole culture’s sense of agency with its scorching takes on social media, racism, misogyny, industrialization, mass extinctions, homelessness, individualism, capitalism, climate disasters, and denial. 

The risk of overwhelming the reader when addressing the enormity of topics that Woo does is mitigated because we trust her voice. We do this because she keeps us tethered to a through line, often by employing experimental devices. For example, the intriguing language play in her fourth chapter involves variations of the final stanza of the poem, “times like these” which is such a stunning ending that I will not give it away in this review.  Nevertheless, that wording recurs in the next poem’s title, and is the main feature of the subsequent poem, “in the middle of a sent –.“  Likewise, her decisive use of unique forms includes redaction poems, word-searches, concrete poems, odes and even anti-odes. These are clever, but never cutesy; rather, these deviations from the norm create an effective and disarming punch to the gut for the reader. 

Never preachy, but lived-in and even gritty, Woo’s first book intensifies the uncomfortable irony of our being accomplices to a dying planet. However, it also posits that we could yet become “woke over/and over again;” empowered by the thrall of nature where it still exists. She offers a world in which it is possible, likely, and maybe even inevitable that we could fuel an environmental revolution by gardening, by dancing, and by re-wilding ourselves.

Carrie Nassif is a queer poet, photographer, psychologist and creativity catalyst/life coach living in northern New Mexico. Her chapbook, lithopaedion was one of this summer’s the Wardrobe’s Best Dressed and a finalist in Yes Yes Books’ Vinyl 45 chapbook prize. A full length poetry collection and/or speculative memoir, necessary and sufficient conditions: the culture girl is forthcoming summer 2024 with Saddle Road Press. Recent work can be found in Concision Poetry Journal, Quartet, and the Colorado Review among others as well as several anthologies.