The Indignity of Seeing: Two New Poetry Collections from Amber Albritton and Amalie Flynn by Andria Williams

The Indignity of Knowing: Perspectives in Verse of a Military Life
Amber Albritton
MilSpeak Books, 2024
140 pp.

Watermelon
Amalie Flynn
Alien Buddha Press
88 pp.

If knowledge is an act of seeing, then Amber Albritton and Amalie Flynn’s 2024 poetry collections (The Indignity of Knowing, and Watermelon, respectively) bring us the deeper, harder-earned, and humbling knowledge that comes from glimpsing and then not looking away. Both books are rich with visual imagery and humane insight, written by poets who are sometimes troubled by, but always passionate about, their vision, pushing through to create honest, shimmering poems about the things we can’t, or often refuse to, see.

 Albritton’s The Indignity of Knowing opens, as did her book launch last year, with a list of names of lost soldiers she has known. It is not a short list. Already we cannot look away from the realities we are going to be dealt:

            “Mrs. Thomas on behalf of the United States Army

And our President, we regret to inform you…”

            Forgive us when we forget.

                        Crushed mud and light.

There are other losses, too. Difficulties within a military marriage: separation, post-traumatic stress. The bittersweet pain of seeing a son go off to a service academy. But Albritton describes the mixed bag of marriage – the worry, laughter, temptation, shared responsibility – with a deft and varied hand.

Write the wiggle, tremor of the mouth you kiss
goodnight year after year, hello every morning. The

shake of fingers reaching to touch you, just

barely, just under the edge of you, so that you know

he’s there…

Write the damage subsiding in the night. Write the

body in the absence of bodies. Write the fear. The

comfort. Write the lover who stays. Write the

children are born. Write the listening. Write the

breath.

From heartbreak to humor – left-behind wives flinging dildos over telephone wires on-base; “The barkeep…looks like Frankenstein. /Reminding me I need to read more Shelley/ & use condoms” – The Indignity of Knowing is a thoughtful, eminently re-readable debut collection, and I hope to read much more from Amber Albritton.

Flynn’s Watermelon focuses on the war-riven children of Gaza, and so is necessarily more somber and more urgent. If you do not want to see, don’t read this book. If you do not want to see, for God’s sake read this book.

Each of the 76 portraits of a Gazan child (all titled “Child” – your child, my child, every child) is gutting on its own, but the cumulative effect is overwhelming, as it is intended to be. If it is overwhelming for us, the now-seeing readers, it is nearly unthinkable to consider the torment brought upon the children themselves. These are children who have not been allowed to be children, whose childhood has been utterly dislocated, if not erased, by war. Heavily utilizing simile and visual imagery, each poem is a necessary but galling snapshot – the briefest flash from a poet who is also a photographer. Flynn’s writing is precise in the way that having your heart plucked out piece by piece would be precise. These poems are like walking through Gaza after a bombing and looking first to the right and to the left, everything else falling away, blurred, except the children themselves who are brought into sharp focus:

            …Both of them motherless
            The baby cries
            For her how his brother
            Rubs his back
            Small
            Hand like a bandage

Or

            They dig for bodies dead
            Or burned under concrete
            Chunks a hand
            Stretching fingers like tiny
            Caterpillars a
            Child crushed chest.      

            Flynn is not about to let you off the hook. Very few Americans, let alone writers, have devoted so much time and thought to the children of Gaza, and one gets the sense that if we all did, things would be very different.

            If seeing war is undignified, then war itself is undignified; and that means we all are, because we know it is happening and we have not stopped it. Don’t look away.

Andria Williams is the author of the novels The Longest Night and The Waiting World. She was founder of the Military Spouse Book Review and former editor-in-chief of The Wrath-Bearing Tree literary journal. She lives in Colorado.