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All the World’s a Cage

Seducing the Asparagus Queen by Amorak Huey
Winner of the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize
Cloudbank Books, 2018

Amorak Huey’s Seducing the Asparagus Queen is a big-hearted book, one of self-reckoning and self-forgiveness. The middle-aged, Middle-American speaker knows how to laugh at his screw-ups, for sure. He more than hints at a past not exactly brimming with the best luck with jobs or relationships, yet he serenades the reader with tidbits from the Great Lake State, waxing elegiac about “organic carrots, acoustic guitars, homemade peach wine” and “seasonal work at a camp store selling beer to vacationing / Michiganders,” along with being a child of the 70s, unbelted in the front seat of a station wagon with “the dunes and don’ts of having hippy-dippy parents.” As he eloquently states, his was “a generation / intimate with macramé.” Despite being spawned in an era when kids “were missiles / ready to be launched at the slightest tap of a brake,” despite a heart murmur, a father who never said he loved him, Huey’s poems attest to a resiliency that has paid off. “If you cannot swim,” he intones, “wrap your arms / around any limb that passes amid the swirl.” His buoyancy is infectious; also, he is spot-on in the imagery department. Case in point:

Yes, these curtains are knit from cat fur,
second-hand choking; my grandmother died
between the couch and the hamster cage.

Spoiler alert: this book contains a passel of hideous clowns—one of them the author himself—white greasepaint and polka dot bow ties galore. This is the speaker’s way of reminding himself to lighten up while reckoning with his flawed yet forgivable self: “That’s the thing. / Even wearing a rainbow wig, you pay for your every mistake.”

Huey is also a master of the honest-to-gosh, non-ironic, love poem. “Let’s swim in powdered sugar / and funnel our cakes together,” he rhapsodically woos in “The Letter X Seduces the Asparagus Queen in Empire, Michigan” (he often refers to himself in poem titles as “The Letter X,” a self-deprecating nod to his myriad botched liaisons). “Let’s pepper and assault and coat ourselves in cornmeal / … first Empire, then state, then all the world’s a cage.” Lines like these remind me of my favorite love poem in the American idiom: Gregory Corso’s “Marriage.” Huey rivals Corso in his exuberance for the beloved, for romantic love itself, in spite of the intrusion of reality, or perhaps because of it. That the town where he’s professing his love has “birthed a half-dozen serial killers and a trio of / test-tube babies” doesn’t stop him from falling head-first into another “steam / and sizzle and deep fry.”

Huey is a humorist of the highest order, right up there with Yogi Berra. It’s difficult to choose my favorites, but here goes: “The problem with confusion / is the confusion,” “The world continues to get in the way; that’s the problem with geography,” and “Once you’ve used a chainsaw / there’s no going back.”

While Huey approaches the role of stand-up comic for the tortured soul, he also isn’t afraid to bring on the gravitas, especially when sizing up his Michigan roots:

There’s blood under the pine straw
of our history, bullet holes
in the city limits signs,
we created more perfect unions
then we laid everyone off.

With clarity and deftness Huey reveals the grit and grimness of a place where “We gladly share our Michigan, our Coldwater, our attempt at spring, / but hold fast to our grievances, our unspoken whatevers—.”

It’s this interplay of self-hate and love, of nostalgia and nixing, that drew me in and kept my attention. Despite all the rigmarole that brought him to middle age, the speaker burns like a Tiki torch on a dark, cold Traverse City night. As Huey sums it up:

No such thing
as too many ex-lovers or too few escape routes,
it’s the porch light left on until the light bulb burns out.

It’s that degree of incandescence that inflames these poems, warming all who come into contact with its resilience and wit. It would be easy to give up and grow cold: “how quickly the human heart freezes, how hard the ice.” Yet, here’s Huey again and again, reminding us

We’re quenching ourselves with an interstellar gas
that’s older than the solar system; older than this light
that warms us.

The past might be a blur of “stale tobacco, raspberry wine coolers, / tattoo ink,” but it’s also a place to return to and be nourished, where “finishing the work is the goal but not the end.”

Martha Silano’s newest collection is Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Bellevue College. 

Issue 16 >