Christian Wethered reviews American Anthem by Kelly Michels (Gallery Press, 2024)
American Anthem is a timely, savage critique of America today. In this searing work, Michels calls out the policy-makers and pharmaceutical corporations for their cynical neglect of the American populus. Her fury spirals out of her own traumatic childhood and the shock of her mother’s death.
The book is full of bones: from a burnt out body in a dumpster, to her brothers’ knuckles in a fist fight. Bones are the nuts and bolts, the irreducible fragments of Michels world; they are symbols of mortality, a brittle reminder of human fragility. In the opening poem, ‘Bone Collector’, the poet’s skeletal mother returns home from the crack house:
veins twisting beneath her skin,
eyes fumbling for a cigarette,
as she attempts to put each bone back in place:
the thoracic vertebrae, the tibia
Michels assesses her mother here almost like a doctor. Her knowledge of anatomy and her skilled, compassionate tone suggest one who has spent her childhood self-regulating, putting her mother’s needs before her own. She is kind: “Mother, this one, I say, / taking her hand, guiding her toward a rib.” The poem ‘Hurricane season in Virginia Beach’ points to further neglect: “And she [my mother] did not soak toast in warm milk and serve it / in a white bowl”. This image evokes Sylvia Plath’s leaving out of bread and milk for her two children before she committed suicide – except in this case there’s no such charity. Similarly, ‘Portrait of a Mother and Child with Flowers’ perhaps alludes to Plath’s ‘Tulips’. We are, once more, at death’s door:
I remember her taking the flowers
In her hand, cutting the stems with a blade
from the kitchen
until the wire beneath the plastic would warp,
twist and snap
as if finally giving up.
The tone is careful yet detached, as if the poet is in a limbo, or state of shock. Her line breaks are delicate yet brittle; it is as though a single click, snip or snap could destroy what she’s describing. The scene recalls the heartbroken widower methodically cutting roses from their stems at the end of Michael Haneke’s Amour.
‘What I Mean When I Say He Went Peacefully’ is a graceful, deeply poignant elegy for the poet’s grandfather. Michels’ qualifying explanations belie an uncertainty, a lack of conviction: “When I say there was […] What I really mean to tell you […]”. It is as though her words slightly lose their confidence, distracted by grief. She remains at the edge; to insist too much could lead to further harm. And Michels can do nothing but remember. In ‘Morning’, she once more hovers: “watching the window, trying / like hell not to remember / because it is all I can do”. She is frequently in two minds, caught between a vague impression and what actually happened: “I remember turning away, […] how she may / or may not have said, love you, / when I turned to leave”.
American Anthem is a timely, savage critique of America today
And she does manage, however fleetingly, to reclaim a part of herself. Joan Didion once said “My stake is always, of course in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point”. Like Didion, Michels is committed to saying what happened and, through this, to trying to make some sense of who she is.
The mother’s death, itself never mentioned directly, nevertheless sends a shockwave through the collection. Many of the poems, such as ‘American Anthem In Traffic’ or ‘American Anthem on Saint Valentines Day’ feed into one another in a swarm. The polemical poems are a clear nod to Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, Ginsberg’s ‘America’, even Baudrillard’s dystopian and premonitory L’Amérique. In her more confessional moments, she can sound like Marie Howe talking about her brother’s death, or Sharon Olds mourning her dead father.
Throughout, the poems are a kind of selfless sacrifice, a documentation that serves as a warning for others. In ‘Cat and Mouse Act of the New Millennium’ she bares her life experience, trauma and fears, in order to warn her younger sister of what’s to come if she stays:
Take the brass knob
in your hands
Turn it
clockwise,
then pull —
The spaces between words and lines communicate a terrible pause, where panic almost prevents the author from running. There’s a sense of something awful here – be it violence, gun-crime, sexual assault, or death. When the poet steps back, she sounds like Auden in ‘September 1, 1939’ warning us about the future: “I and the public know / what all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return”.
Poetry feeds into the same system as everything else – is perhaps a mere symptom of the same violence and hegemonies that haunt society as a whole. And yet … her testament is worthy: it has meaning
The poem ‘American Anthem as Word’ is a highlight, and a microcosm for the entire collection. Michels draws on language itself – its violent history, its institutional underpinnings, when she invokes the OED’s definition and etymology of ‘rise’: “Rise / 1 (v) to rise up, overpower, from the middle English / risen or Old English risan; to make an attack”. Poetry feeds into the same system as everything else – is perhaps a mere symptom of the same violence and hegemonies that haunt society as a whole. And yet, as with Terrance Hayes, her testament is worthy: it has meaning. ‘American Anthem as Word’ is an event, like Ginsberg’s ‘America’, or Plath’s ‘Daddy’, where we wholeheartedly confront our flaws, our histories, our institutions. She adds, “No one knows what / happened, only that a sea scattered into rivers, / the language lost, children slaughtered”. The dismissive, exhausted lines evoke Adrienne Rich’s ‘What Kind of Times Are These’.
The book ends where it began, with its stifling, echoic refrains, its lonely, heartfelt song. We’re left with a singular, grief-stricken voice, the voice of someone whose mother is dead and won’t stop screaming:
like laughter, like bullets, a mother’s scream rising
into the point-blankness of space.
Christian Wethered (christianwethered.com) is a poet and songwriter based in Dublin. He has featured in PN Review, Poetry Wales, The London Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, The Friday Poem and The Moth, and came second in the 2024 Southword subscribers competition.
