Allison Elizabeth

Book Review

A review of Heather McHugh’s It Looks Like a Man (Wesleyan University Press). Purchase the collection directly from the publisher here.

It Looks Like a Man digs up the dirt of loneliness and smears the love we use to combat it allover our faces until we are a grotesque version of our pictures on the wall.

McHugh captures the way our minds twist empty calorie flings into lobster or chicken weddings by transforming images with homonyms and double entendres.

The thesis of the work I found most prevalent in the poem, Voice: “The being born is passive / but the dying’s active.” Love is a life, and if that life does not serve us, we must end it. That’s why it is so hard to leave dead end relationships. “the destiny’s / not just the being dead. / It is the being killed.” McHugh guides the reader on an all too familiar journey, but does not leave us stranded. She gives an escape route.

Building from the fire to the ashes, we are left to plant the seeds of a new world. The reader wants more, not from McHugh, but from ourselves. Poetry as a way of guidance is satisfyingly unfinished here, and in the margins of each page is room to write what we’ll do after reflecting upon what is written. We cannot undo what we are, but we can become anew.

---

It Looks Like a Man

Heather McHugh

Wesleyan University Press

68pp

$10

---

Allison Elizabeth is a prose and poetry reader for L’Esprit Literary Review based in Chicago.