What You Want

Facing threats of environmental collapse and her own mortality, McLane (Some Say) pushes on the boundaries of selfhood in her enlightening offering. The collection begins by setting the scene: a seemingly hopeless present in which “the sealed-in elect to survive” and “the drowners to drown.” In the poem “Self-Reliance,” McLane probes the contradictions and limits of the concept, utilizing her texting software’s auto-correct feature to gesture at the slippages between the voice of the self and a larger, more varied community of intelligences: “My preferred pronouns/ are we and we and I// sink into the self/ at my risk. Our/ s. O dialectic!” Challenging narratives that center the individual at the expense of the collective, McLane imagines a world where “anyone could walk in/ my mind.” Later pieces incorporate overheard speech to approximate what such openness might feel like, and the final lines of the collection gesture toward hope through radical listening: “I haven’t given up/ yet! we haven’t!/ The connectivity is good!/ Today every conversation/ found an open channel.” With humor and insight, this points the way toward a more humane and expansive understanding. (May)