To Build a Brother

Aurora Shimshak reviews Alison Thumel’s debut poetry collection, “Architect.”

By Aurora ShimshakOctober 24, 2024

• Poetry

THE FIRST THING I remember Alison Thumel saying is that she had built a table. That was when I knew her as an alumna of my MFA program, a guest speaker on a Zoom screen in my poetry workshop. Now that Thumel and I have become friends, it doesn’t surprise me at all that she took an architecture class while getting her master’s in poetry. Thumel is a maker. She carves spoons and fashions broadsides from linoleum blocks; for the cover of her debut collection Architect, she created a cyanotype in which prairie grasses intersect with ruler-straight lines reminiscent of blueprints. Thumel told me once that she builds her poems—she moves words around on the page and revises by pouring her words into different forms. With its sestinas and sonnets, erasures and visual poems, this book offers traces of these acts of building.

Winner of the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, Thumel’s Architect was published this spring by the University of Arkansas Press. In her preface, the series editor, poet Patricia Smith, writes, “There are so, so many ways to speak loss, but I’ve never experienced such structured tenderness, the building and rebuilding of what crafted the hollow.” What crafted the hollow for Thumel is a car accident that killed her brother John. Early in the book, she writes, “How easy it is to say, When he died, my brother became the architect of the rest of my life.” But Thumel is not interested in easy descriptions of grief. Her brother, she writes, was an engineer, not an architect, and it is Thumel who endeavors to make structures that will “carry weight.” As she experiences myriad states of grief, she must build prolifically. She tears down and inspects the ruin, starts from scratch and patches over with vines. What these poems offer, then, is not aphoristic wisdom but a series of windows through which we can view a process of inquiry.

One of her tools in this inquiry is form. I dare any poetry lover to open Architect and not be excited by its inventiveness. To study the texture of loss, Thumel erases it, cuts it up, reimagines it as a brutalist structure, a labyrinth, a series of course notes. One of the most striking visual poems of the collection, “[blueprint for a brother],” is a collage of a floor plan, an embroidered vine, and cut-up pieces of text. In this piece, Thumel explores the question of who is building whom. She “hinge[s] on a line drawn / by” her brother, but closes the poem with herself as architect:

            to build a brother
        a blue line on the page

                                                    a single rib in the dark
 

In the pages that follow, Thumel continues to explore this reciprocal process of building: brother building sister as sister builds brother, grief building the griever as the griever shapes her grief. In another of her visual poems, “[blueprint with ship],” the text of the obituary she wrote for her brother fills the body of a boat sailing in a sea of dark tangled thread. The ship’s metaphorical resonances are layered. The obituary text recalls the idea of the brother she is building. However, on the boat’s sail is one of her architectural drawings, an echo of an earlier poem in which she writes, “I am rebuilding a life that will never be the same.” In this new life, Thumel’s and her brother’s identities can feel as confused as that sea of tangled thread. In “[Floor Plan: Someone once told me],” she writes, “I am no longer sure if I am Ariadne or the architect. I cannot determine whether my brother is Theseus or the monster.” Whoever they are, what’s clear is that she and her brother are entwined in making each other’s lives.

In the collection’s opening poem, “Prairie Style,” Thumel reaches into memory. In short couplets, she constructs a childhood scene of herself and her brother finding what’s inside a milkweed pod. The perspective briefly turns to what they don’t see—the predator, “a hawk overhead.” Here, Thumel suggests what our narrative minds can do: once a tragedy occurs, look back and underscore the foreshadowing we didn’t mark. In the second section of the book, steered by the architectural term “sistering,” someone tells her, “[I]n order to be a myth, a story must have a degree of inevitability.” In her poems, the line between myth and memory fluctuates. How can one know whether there was inevitability, if it is possible to insert the predator circling all along? Either way, the final turn in “Prairie Style” eviscerates. After the moment of discovery, finding the milkweed’s feathers, she writes: “Inside a memory // is its ruin. / Inside ruin, what?”

The images of childhood play crumble, and we enter the body of the collection primed to examine the ruin that is grief.

When the ruin is the mourner’s body, the crumbling can be hard to see. Taking inspiration from the architectural term “coping,” a “capping or covering of a wall that protects the parts vulnerable to water damage” (in Thumel’s own definition), the poem of that title begins, “I too have water problems, / grief directional as a swelling.” The lines are double-spaced, with the white between them filled with the repetition of one grayed-out sentence: “So what if the building still stands.” The term “coping” suggests the ways a mourner can deal with grief, but the repetition of this line suggests frustration with not being able to convey the extent of internal damage. The poem concludes: “Inside me, / a load-bearing frame, shifted.”

That last line is footnoted, pointing us to an engineer’s report on famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, warning the structure is not safe and recommending the house “not be used for any important structure.” Like architectural terms, Wright—his buildings, his life, his philosophy of architecture—becomes a mirror and frame that Thumel uses to better understand her own tragedy and art-making. She pays particular attention to the murder of Wright’s mistress in Taliesin, the Midwestern home he built for her. Here, too, is a brutality that’s hard to speak, or even conceive. In “[Floor Plan: All myths have a body count],” Thumel’s mind “skips over the bloody prose of it.” Although she informs the reader of “the house aflame, the residents fleeing, each felled with a hatchet at the threshold,” what she thinks is “felled like a beam,” an easier image than bodies. A similar aversion to directly speaking the brutal loss of a loved one can be seen in “[Floor Plan: Taliesin destroyed by fire].” Thumel meditates on the telegram’s omission of the murder of Wright’s love, “as if it was more useful to focus on the thing that could be salvaged. What beams could be pulled from the smoldering pile.” Thumel considers the parallel language surrounding her brother’s death: how black blood collected in his ear but her dad spoke about his new haircut, how she wrote in his obituary that he was a “fierce and devoted friend and brother” and omitted that he could be cruel.

In Architect, though, she circumvents elegy. She writes that “it comes out too beautiful, with none of the sharp rocks at the edges.” Her poetic structures hold space for her anger, for “what triggers the pictures [she] never saw,” and her lighting of matches in the parking lot on the day of her brother’s wake. In myths and memorials, she searches for the body count. In “[Floor Plan: I came to the class believing],” she remembers that the word stanza means “room” in Italian. In Architect, she takes care to make rooms for the bereft left behind on cliffs or with water on all sides.

Near the end of the book, Thumel takes us to the base of a roller coaster. At the top of the ride, she leans back; her “eyes turn to the dark-blue sky.” It is possible to read this leaning back as acceptance—the poem is the third in her series of solutions to the Ship of Theseus Paradox, “wherein a Prairie Style death is inevitable.” The confrontation of inevitability in this memory reaches out beyond her brother’s death. In the images of the roller coaster, it’s as if we’re seeing a life through time-lapse photography, a gut-dropping pace that renders physical our ephemerality and lack of control. When Thumel’s mouth “widens to a scream,” the poem opens to the joy and terror inherent in the acknowledgment of mortality. The movement of the ride underscores what the preceding poems have shown: no story we tell ourselves is stable. Acts of rebuilding—whether of self, story, or memory—remain fluid, aware, curious, and alive.