‘Some Things About Home’
— Reneé Bibby
Recently, I traveled to New York, a towering contrast to the low-profile adobe of my adopted city Tucson. Being in one place makes us think of another place, so of course, while I ate pizza and navigated subway systems, I thought of home. What my city means to me, and how I would speak of it. Wendy Taylor Carlisle’s ‘Some Things About Home’ is not the narrative I would write about home—it’s better. It undercuts sentimentality to give the true grit of a place “where the chicken houses / susurrate with the murmur of debeaked hens / and the stench of pigs raised on concrete / rinses into the Buffalo River, where the big road / is coming to our little mountains.” It’s not specifically Tucson or New York, but in some way it’s any city, any place where many people pass through, and those who stay occupy the disenfranchised fringes. While it has the easy authority of an insider, her poem doesn’t seek to woo you; who knows or cares why the tourists visit. It’s the opposite of a classic pastoral: it is unsentimental and clear-eyed, and in being unflinching, it becomes startlingly tender, about the land, the politics, and experiences that birthed us.