Book Review: Ways We Vanish

Frida Aguilar Estrada

Ways We Vanish by Todd Dillard, Okay Donkey Press, $14 paperback, 2020

Reviewed by Shannon Frost Greenstein

What is grief?

Todd Dillard’s debut chapbook opens with this line, not exactly a rhetorical question but something still unanswerable. What follows is the author’s attempt to understand, to understand what is left behind when someone is lost. Thus readers will experience Ways We Vanish, a collection which, on a fundamental level, regards absence as something tangible; an actual entity, a hole in the matter of the world. Take “The Rabbits:”

Sometimes the emptiness likes to flirt…and the

absence beside me stands up, stretches, larger and

larger it swells, a vacancy/blossoming like a sail…so

big it’s like it’s everywhere

Ways We Vanish reveals it is from grief, from the glaring absences we face, that everything moves forward, that life morphs and grows and responds to its environment. It is the nature of existence to remain transient, after all, to constantly move and flow so that things are never exactly the same; and isn’t that how grief feels, as well, as evidenced in “Advice for a Newly Dead Mother.”

This is the grief you want/a presence amidst the day/and its litany of absences, a wound in a place/prone to reopening

These pages mirror the evolution of a life, lived experiences piled one on top of the other, adapting to circumstances and straining to grow. Short pieces of prose and metaphor, featuring family and vacancy and love and hard truths and the omnipresence of grief, weave around and throughout a strong foundation built of Todd’s poetic ability and mastery of language.

The collection is broken into two halves, each with their own central theme, and we are left, at the end, feeling that there is something — something corporal, a visceral ache — which was not there before.

Part 1

How does one recover from the dead/when their needs continue to send us to our knees? — “Family Plot”

Part 1 is Texas: the temperature, the topography, the memories of childhood set against a haze of time and hindsight. The poet says in “East Texas,” “I want to stop here and say something about Texas heat/how it can be intimate, how it can hurt you like a lover;” and in “My Father’s Feet,” “hammer-headed oil derricks spin and spin behind us, pecking at the Earth like dead hens.” It is haunting, and evocative, and very much a snapshot of a moment in time, part of a history the poet will never escape.

Part 1 is trauma, the trauma of fallible parents and broken families and addiction by proxy. In these poems, grief is a character, rushing in to fill the absence of a dead mother, the void that was left when something vital was taken.

Part 1 is the admission that death is inevitable; guaranteed. In “Young Monsters Watching a Sex Ed Video,” the poet writes, “(they) sense the sadness that will come — this is natural — with yearning to rein in their lips…they are naked and shadow-blued/in front of a mirror — this happens to everyone…”

This poem, in its foreshadowing, echoes universal experiences — sex, identity, change, death — that the rest of Ways We Vanish works to capture. We see the theory of recapitulation, we witness that life is cyclical, and we acknowledge all the ways that people vanish, perhaps feeling a twinge at our own mortality.

I am always reliving my life this way: the past greets

me in store-window glances— “Parallax”

Part 2

And she whispers into your ear/you will never be anything/but the absence I put inside you.— “Survivor Parable”

Part 2 is recovering, and healing; Part 2 is growth, and new beginnings. This section begins with a poem entitled, “The Heraclitus Door,” which sets the tone for the poems that follow. Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus is known for his aphorism, “You can never step in the same river twice;” his philosophy focused on the transient, ever-shifting nature of existence. So, too, is the nature of the poems in Part 2.

Part 2 is being stuck in the past, even as you look to the future, and moving ahead, even as you can’t transcend your starting point. This collection, in focusing on change, also manages to honor formative beginnings. The poet writes in “Survivor Parable,” “You’re tired of telling yourself not to write/about your dead mother,” and we can see in this poem the tension in which this author must have been steeped. In struggling to grieve, to grow, we feel the poet’s frustration and his yearning; the poems in Part 2 are a result of those emotions taking root.

In “Persimmons,” he writes, “if I knew/dreams could come true/but only a few,” and we see this echoed throughout key events in the poet’s adult life. Through death and life and weddings on a beach and a newborn’s ICU room, we see the relentless trudging of time; things changing, evolving, devolving, but never, ever staying the same.

Through this movement, we see key ideas repeat: bells; doors; birds; holes; fires. With this imagery, the pieces of prose in Ways We Vanish feel like interconnected parts of a whole, even as time is not exactly linear. The result is a book that is a journey, full as a lifetime in only 37 years.

Ways We Vanish is, ultimately, a coming-of-age story, with all the victories and defeats and insights and frustrations we have come to identify with maturation. The poet writes (and we can all, surely, share this sentiment), “I turned, snatched the handle, found it locked. I knocked and I knocked; the past would not let me back in.”

So what is there to do, then, but…continue on? “This breath, and this breath, and this breath….”