Reviewed by Abbie Kiefer
Obsolete Hill
by Meg Eden Kuyatt
Fernwood Press
2026, Paperback
Meg Eden Kuyatt offers readers two guideposts as they begin Obsolete Hill. First, a definition of the Japanese word haikyo, the literal translation of which is the collection’s namesake—a term used to describe abandoned, human-made places. Second, an epigraph from the Biblical book of Zephaniah: “Though they build houses, they will not live in them; though they plant vineyards, they will not drink the wine.” The prophet is predicting the eventual humbling of those who trust too fully in their own wealth and power.
It would be easy to see the latter as direct commentary on the former, as much of Japan’s haikyo was constructed during a post-war economic boom and abandoned in the wake of an economic crash. But Kuyatt interprets Zephaniah’s words more broadly. Each person yearns to create legacy, she tells us, just as each of us will someday face our own fallibility.
Working in the spirit of haikyo exploration culture, which emphasizes observation and documentation, Kuyatt builds poems that revel in specificity: a bowling alley with one hundred and eight unused lanes, a mostly shuttered mall in which a man tends aloe vera. Reading these poems through the lens of Kuyatt’s linked interests—meaning-making and ephemerality—we can appreciate why one might garden in a failing space. We see how the one hundred and eight lanes—which correspond to one hundred and eight causes of suffering in Buddhism—signify a kind of loneliness and loss we might forever strive to overcome.
And can we be successful in that overcoming? No, Kuyatt says—and yes. Without question, the collection’s speaker understands her own limitations. In “Thoughts at an Estate Sale,” she writes, “Everyone’s chipped coffee mugs and fine china all laid out / fill a single table. This, too, is meaningless.” In “Omen for Moving too Fast,” a woodpecker dies after flying into a window. “If only I knew taxidermy, I could bring it back to life,” she says—a restoration, she knows, that would make the bird only a facsimile of itself.
And yet the speaker, who often references concepts from the Christian tradition, isn’t without hope. In “ekphrasis of haikyo image search history,” she hears God speak to her:
“your body is a temple,
and I don’t build temples
to make haikyo,” You say.
The idea of the body as temple is rooted in Christian belief that God indwells his people. A rebuilt temple is also a metaphor, recorded in the biblical book of John, for Jesus’s resurrection after crucifixion. Kuyatt acknowledges our finiteness (“All the bodies underneath me, / like dolls boxed in God’s basement,” she writes in “Cemetery”) but finds solace in the suggestion of an existence to come. She seems, also, to find purpose in documentation, giving careful attention to the mundane and celebrating human persistence amid impermanence. “Even in these brief costumes,” she writes, “we are alive and keep living.”
About the reviewer: Abbie Kiefer is the author of the poetry collection Certain Shelter (June Road Press, 2024). Her poems have also appeared in Boulevard Magazine, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, and Ploughshares. She has twice been a semifinalist for the 92Y Discovery Prize.