Reviewed by Amilya Robinson
Country Songs for Alice
by Emma Binder
Tupelo Press
Paperback, March 2024, ISBN:978-1-961209-02-2, $14.95
“In the Heart of the Village” and Hot Pink author Emma Binder shows off their timeless literary artistry in a new poetry chapbook, Country Songs for Alice. Turn up the volume as Binder takes us on an enchanting ride through their album full of ‘songs’ fuzing Midwestern aesthetic with queer love and longing in this story of discovery, wild landscapes, and shifting identity. Country Songs for Alice is all of the things you love about Country and all of the things about tradition that stifle you too. Binder’s poetry is gritty and ethereal, familiar and vivid, and an astonishing display of human vulnerability.
“The First Song,” draws you in like magic—the scenic beginning of an old, classic film. Every detail, every rose-colored, thorny memory is on display for viewing. But it’s when we finally get a close-up of the main characters that the true spell takes hold. “If you want to sit at my table, I’ll spit-style my hair and serve you,” the speaker divulges, “I’ll talk to you with ripped silk in my throat, boiled creekwater, I’ll track jackrabbits all night through snow and drag them home” (1). The author’s words are like a painting, bewitching and ensnaring you into “The iridescent sheen that divides the hurting bedroom from the hurting wind. The smashed picture frame that sits beneath a black leather saddle and a pinned rose, proof of boyhood” (1). “Alice,” the narrator addresses directly, “if you knock, I’ll hear chimes. Doesn’t matter how deep asleep I’ve been. The dream will cleave into two pieces, ruptured by your name spelled out backwards in steam” (1). Yearning is the first of many words that come to mind when I reflect back on this particular poem. A rough, scraping kind of desire that leaves a trail of blood as it surges forward and spills out. It’s the kind of wanting that drives you to be something you’re not, to do the things you’d never normally do. There’s a lingering toxicity about it all. For how can you really be with someone you can’t be your most authentic self around? Binder’s nuance in combining such powerful visuals with the rawest of emotions is phenomenal.
One lyrical poem brings us to a rodeo, a classic midwestern get-together, and the precipice of hidden identity. Binder, again, comes busting out of the gate with those delicious descriptors of “bootprints on wooden, / age-silvered bleachers. The slow, // gnostic orbit of dust / like scripture. The jackknifing // cowboy’s hips against his bronco. / All of it sensual” (9). And it all collects together to create this colorful backdrop for the speaker to expose their lurking thoughts. “There was so much muscle / bucking in that arena, no one much // looked at me,” they describe, “If I wore / leather boots, flannel, // and denim, I was every / other person. When really // I was a steer, broad-shouldered / and comet-eyed. Muscled in my blood- // stained garments and quiet rage. / My pulse quickened // with the secret joy / of deceit” (9). Every curated piece of imagery is steeped in defiance, in love for the art of it, but also in finding little acts of rebellion in a culture so steeped in the confines of heteronormative tradition and expectation. The danger of exposure is both daunting and exhilarating, an adrenaline rush, and there is a simulated feeling of blending in, an acceptance of the narrator’s true self. It takes a skillful mind to write such intoxicating language into a piece.
One of Binder’s many talents is their ability to transport you to any location at any time, but especially those environments inextricably tied to nature, to the wild, to those places that awaken instincts that lie within every human being. In one poem that takes us to “the plains” we are told, “You need hooves or adaptations, like how the fox twists her shadow into scrap metal, to camouflage herself from hunters in their cars. When the wind dies down, you can smell purple bulbs and hidden agate. That’s how you’ll know the animal parts of you are not dead” (25). Binder’s poetry speaks of the pain of masking one’s identity for the sake of survival, of the fear one faces when it comes time to see if there’s any real part of them left after paying the price for that mask. The comparison of “animal parts” to the authentic parts of ourselves, the natural and instinctual parts of ourselves that deserve to be seen without judgment or fear, is beautifully chosen. In the same poem, the speaker invites us into the truck in which they sleep, instructing us, as if speaking to the readers of a how-to book, to “Pinch the moonlight off your legs like a bedsheet. Wrap yourself in your taking-out-the-garbage coat, green and stained and coarse, from Army Surplus. In the middle of the night, all the eyes of nocturnal creatures will twitch like candles. Shake the ants from your black hair, watch stubble sprout on your stomach and chin. Such wildness has to it the tinny cast of a nightmare. But it’s a nightmare to which you belong” (25). Binder embraces both metaphorical and physical wildness to a whole new level in this poem. That first line about “the moonlight” is so gorgeous and almost dainty compared to this rough coat from “Army Surplus,” the creatures lurking in the night, and the bugs and hair that have overtaken the narrator’s body. Perhaps, in a way, it is a how-to book, a book of advice on how to survive in the wild, how to let nature take over when it is the people who have abandoned you.
In the final poem, “The Last Song,” Binder pulls at strings left dangling from the edges of the poems that came before, plaiting them together in one final, reflective, and explosive exposure of the narrator’s underbelly, of the inside of their head as the book concludes. “I’m trying to get it all down,” they explain, “before…the next curl of thunder that unlaces me” (29). The speaker admits that they “would have eaten at your table,”, “gnawed red stars and cried like a dog,”, and “eaten fistfuls of dirt // or walked into the train tunnels black socket, from which some people / never get to walk out” (29). The exhale of emotion in these final lines of poetry is like a storm, a flood persisting into every crack of space and taking everyone caught up in the drift with it. At last, the narrator admits that “country songs / are meant to describe a feeling, at most a chapter, / because you can’t live your life // while you’re hurting and drinking that way. I had to / wake up to the sky’s excoriating blueness, that sunlight / that seemed to carve me down to my livid bones. // I had to make a decision…But sometimes I still want to ride out with my hands / on your shirttail, while coyotes howl in a wind-tipped // chorus” (31). These final lines are akin to reading the most personal thoughts written down in someone’s diary. There’s a shift, an acceptance of what would never be, and an acknowledgment of what was. The last dregs of desperation and poisonous desire splatter onto the page so the author can make room for brighter things. Binder’s poetry is an inspiration. It is humble and theatrical, the most visceral of human experiences communicated in the most stunning of ways. Country Songs for Alice is a candid love letter to queer people everywhere.
About the reviewer: Amilya Robinson is a senior at San Diego State University pursuing a degree in English as well as certificates in Children’s Literature and Creative Editing & Publishing. Currently, she writes creatively for SDSU’s first all-women-run magazine, Femininomenon, and edits for Splice, The Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship at SDSU College of Arts and Letters. In the future, she hopes to begin pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing for Fiction.