Theresa Whitehill’s poems tread a tenuous path at the boundaries between personal and collective reckonings with work that portrays grief, tenderness, defiance, and outrage. The result is a suite of fourteen poems that witness the almost unbearable pace of relentless crises of recent years—covid, climate change, racial injustice, the threat of totalitarianism, immigration crises—and begins to dwell in what might lie beyond these times.
“Whitehill subverts the forms of the lament and the ballad and the assumed lyricism that goes along with those forms, nearly lulling the reader into a seeming complacency, before tripping the reader up at a key moment to declare: “War then: the background always. Dreamers / and heretics—always.” — Inge Bruggeman, Foreword, The Heavy Lifting Companion
Many of the texts selected by Rice for the artists’ book are drawn from the poem of the same name. The title arose out of a volley of generative emails between Rice and Whitehill which are documented in “Genesis” in The Heavy Lifting Companion.
HEAVY LIFTING
This is the pause I am flying in, flying hard so as not to fall to earth.
Apparently, grief is not a calm, but a huge effort.
—letter from a friend
It’s hard to convey the crisis that happened to us
back in the early 21st century, the multiple crises,
the concatenation of disasters, the wounding,
the beginning of the ending of the wounding,
the unraveling of all that had gone before.
That we were already carrying the burden
of the dying off of the polar bears
and the failing of the glaciers, that was hard enough,
but it was when birds began to fall out of the sky—
emaciated, desperate, if not already dead,
that we realized.
We were no longer living in the time of prophecy,
no longer in the theory of it all. It was unfolding
all around us, one heart-stop after another,
a chain reaction of seemingly helpless events.
We had poisoned the well. And just because
we couldn’t conceive of it doesn’t mean that
it didn’t happen. It just means we couldn’t conceive
of it. Because the evidence, there it was—
looking up, the blue heron folded over on itself
heading south in the early sky. And north,
crossing paths—a helicopter.
From this time, we date a different life. The stories
we told our children changed at this time.
Our dreams changed. Some of us stopped dreaming.
Others registered guns or took part
in compromised immune systems.
War, then: the background always. Dreamers
and heretics—always.
And out of this arose a powerful and dangerous
tendency, a hiccup in history, a scratch in the record’s
fine vinyl grooves that caused it to skip and repeat
unerringly—so that while some of us were remembering,
were touching our faces to the glass, others were forgetting,
or not so much forgetting as to never have taken in those events
that were more than the consciousness could bear.
We lived in that nervous slice between forgetting
and the inevitable. This was the place we were brought to,
where we could stand and look out, and call out
to our children. This was the place where we lived
and where we ate and made love, amidst emergency vehicles
and fraud and the study of legal briefs, among our most sacred
texts that had become practically useless to us.
They were all on fire anyway.
Birds were at one time used as weapons of war.
They would be doused with flammable fluid and lit
on fire and sent into the enemy’s lines. Incendiary
birds could change the fate of battles.
Everywhere we went there was this upwelling
of the things of the earth—butterflies, yes, the leafing out
of the oak, the composition of new forms of music,
but also tombstones, defunct tractors, oil tankers run aground,
the bellies of salamanders, the windows
without glass.
We will make do with what we are given—a grammar
of what exists in which grief is a room locked up
within the emptiness of the sky. You who come after us
will carry the earth on your shoulders as birds carry the air
and are carried. Be lifted by these things that broke us.