A Review of "Let the Forest Go" by Alumnus Justin Wymer

In Justin Wymer’s stunning second book, letting go of the past while simultaneously welcoming an unsteady present seems to be at the heart of his project.  

"Let the Forest Go" emerged from handwritten journals kept from September 2015 through June 2017, while Wymer was living abroad in Spain during a transitional time in his life post-graduate school in Iowa City. Unable to return home to West Virginia to his mother and brother who were “partners in a delicate dance of survival” as he writes in his notes, Wyman reckons from afar both his personal and national identity; that is, the tension created from the coexistence of his Appalachianness and an emergent awareness of his queerness - all the while, the rise of Trump and authoritarianism looming in the background.  

Although primarily a book of fragmented poetry, it reads from page to page as a serial collection of forms such as journal entries, prose blocks, experimental memoir, and epistolary poems addressed to loved ones whose shared memories act as coordinates to an ever-vanishing sense of home:

Remember we were drunk on raki, eschewing death, we were inessential reading Rilke, terrified of men’s bodies, wanting one. We knew to cure ourselves meant to give completely. In brief, the soul made sense for a night in its bloated abattoir, or was that a remark, who can tell where I end and home lessons to reverie.

When writing about the opposition to Trump and how “three million marched in pink against the Beast today”, Wymer allows hope to enter him while simultaneously recognizing the precarity of a freedom that hinges on the smallest movements or actions in a divided America:

I couldn’t help it. I let myself hope. The rumor of freedom is rarely so articulate.   

I’m afraid to dispose of the chicken bones on the plate beside my bed. I can’t explain it. If one thing shifts, then this one good thing might too.   

But more than simply a collection of poems, the act of collecting memories, or its fragments, for Wymer becomes both a generative process as well as a documentation of his survival. One gets the sense that the relentless self-archiving and refusal to “fix the fractures or prune away the excess, lest a vital detail be dimmed” becomes an act of autopoiesis as meaning accumulates within its own network of impressions and interrogations, aimed both inwardly and outwardly:

At what point did it become OK to regret regret, to forget you have forgets, and let all that confetti clog the arteries, to dine the specter of who you’d like to be…  

Writing oneself back into existence seems to be one way to reclaim identity from a world that “didn’t want people like me,” as Wymer states. If otherness is constantly being pushed to the edge of displacement in this new political landscape, then it's that edge where the poems are often positioned - creating both tension and moments of poetic release.    

But to name a thing for Wymer- in all its multitudes of memory, desire, hope, or anxiety - is not just a cataloging or aestheticizing of poetry for poetry’s sake, but a recognition of individual and communal trauma that allows vulnerability to become an agent of communication and change:

Less beauty than the action of beauty. Beauty is a movement. Less rising to the fore and more coming to stand in for summary.

In these trying times, what do we hold to and what must we let go of? How does both the act and reenactment of witness or memory confirm one’s existence in a world where the marginalized are systematically silenced by poverty, dislocation, and political power? These are the important questions Wymer leaves us with that must, for the sake of a shared humanity, be urgently reckoned with.