MICRO REVIEW: TO FALL FABLE BY ALICE WICKENDEN by Shannon Wolf
Variant Literature, 2021. 28 Pages. $8.00
British writer Alice Wickenden tries to make meaning of trauma in To Fall Fable, a chapbook. In a narrative engaged with the survival of sexual abuse, her speakers are all at once subdued, furious, and cautious, bouncing from densely-populated prose poems to couplets concerned with the silence of the page’s white space. Three poems are posed as parables that explore the Biblical character of Eve, beginning as a mere rib, and becoming a woman who kisses and uses the wings of birds as handkerchiefs. Wickenden writes: “They knew themselves to be of marrow and potential life. They supported Adam’s heart. They laughed a lot. When God told her what a wife was for, Eve said: but we already do all that.” Her prose poems are rife with allegory, but throughout she does not shy away from sexual or feminist themes. In “Before Paradise —”, the speaker “takes communion” with a friend in a tense tangle under a tree after a Scout meeting. And in the final piece “Crown of Sonnets”, which both recalls and cognizes a history of sexual abuse, the tangibility of language is postured as a lesson: “...the cavernous relationship, pulling everything in, tugging at your sense of gravity. the way that, finally, he taught you that friend and rapist can be synonymous the way that language folds in on itself. everything collapses.”