Does She Have a Name?

Weaving the story of an older woman's declining health with that of her grand-daughter's near-stillborn birth and subsequent disabilities, Witte (The Apparitioners) takes on the subjects of family, medical practice, and physical difference, as a participant witness to tragedy: "Your life depends on Orapred,/ Flovent and Albuterol, medicines/ assuaging raw alveoli./ I cradle you against/ congestion, lullaby a lie." In its best moments, the formalism of Witte's verse heightens its emotional resonance, particularly in the closing couplet. In a poem about revisiting his living will during a period of extreme uncertainty, the final, formal lines create a beautiful, ironic tension between bureaucratic tasks and the lives they sustain: "Asleep, our issue shudders in your arms./ I sign in triplicate against more harm." Unfortunately, some poems' rhyming patterns produce an odd tone, and the humor present isn't biting enough for its stark juxtaposition of subject. In "To a Peanut," for example, Witte gives a strange amount of space to facts about peanuts before moving towards his grand-daughter's deadly allergy to them: "Misnomered bean of many purposes,/ spreadable or whole, Carver's humble muse,/ you lurk between ingredients as oil,/ ... swell/ pale lips to crimson plates and supersize/ her tongue until she suffocates and dies." (Mar.)