National Poetry Month: Pierson Wiese tells tiny, exquisite stories in collection
April is National Poetry Month. Before the month gets away from us I want to cover an exceptional new poetry collection by Anne Pierson Wiese. In these works, the poet pivots between the rural Midwest to the densely packed neighborhoods of New York City.
The book is divided into two sections. The first, “Life in a House in the Upper Midwest,” contains poems reflecting her meditations on living in the Dakotas. The second half, “Bayside, Queens, as Seen from the Window of a Car,” has an urban vibe.
She observes keenly. In “Autocorrect for Beauty” she notices a hawk: “I’ve passed the empty pergola at least five hundred times since then, in every kind of weather, but if I look, my hawk is there: beauty by surprise overrides all succeeding days-and so the part of us that isn’t us survives.”
In a city poem, “Making Beauty,” she sees a young man in the subway: “I thought about beauty
— how making it and seeing it are lonely in different ways: one the loneliness of being in sole command, the other of being the only witness.”
My favorites are poems about her grandparents. In “Wild Grapes” she writes: “By the time I knew them, my grandparents didn’t say much to each other beyond what was unavoidable: I remember my grandfather flipping his table knife around — holding the blade — pointing the back end at a bowl of butter, my grandmother passing it.”
Each poem in “Which Way Was North” tells a miniature, exquisite story.
Recently Wiese and her partner, Ben Miller, moved back to New York City. Miller’s 2013 memoir, “River Bend Chronicle: the Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa” is one of my favorite books of all time.