The Brooklyn Rail

Lauren K. Watel’s debut poetry collection, Book of Potions, begins with the equation: potion = poem + fiction. Because Watel employs poetic elements and fictional devices, it is debatable whether these pieces are prose poetry or microfictions; however, regardless of how readers categorize the work, through it Watel has created memorable little worlds.

Many of these potions are set in vague places, creating a surreal experience. Yet readers recognize these places precisely because the feelings they elicit are exacting. The knife on the cover pins meaning, our emotions, and current societal issues down. The blasé and anesthetized tone of the book captures a disembodied voice of desolation, speaking to both the disconnection from others and within ourselves that many of us as readers currently feel. But the work is also mature in consistency and wisdom, discerning and measured.

Beginning with the snow-covered meadow in the first piece, silence extends through the collection. The potions are linked by tone, emotion, and recurring elements such as the color white, masks, faces, signs, and snow. Subtle connections lead from one piece to another; “When You Drive” contains a conjurer, followed by the piece “The Illusionist.” The experience feels like wandering through a house with many rooms, where each room shares commonalities and yet is unique in small ways.

Cohesive in form and themes with a graceful economy of language, the pieces are complex and layered. The potions look blocky on the page but are multidimensional. Reading this collection feels like dreaming with the weight of a nightmare; the writing carries emotional seriousness along with fantastic or absurd elements. The start of some pieces seems unassuming, then sharp lines provide sudden impact. In “The Jails,” Watel writes “The jails, they’re full of prisoners. Why are they full of prisoners? Because everyone’s doing drugs or selling them. Why is everyone doing drugs or selling them? Because they’re bored and desperate. Why are they bored and desperate? Because they have no work.” The question and answer format is conversational, as if a parent is answering a toddler’s “why” questions. Then: “Why did the jobs go away? Because the bosses put in robots. Why did the bosses put in robots? Because robots don’t ask questions.”

Other pieces start with a bang, then lull the reader, so when the bite returns, it stings. “Enjoy the Mayhem” begins with “Mayhem like you’ve never seen, chaos in the streets, alarms howling, fights and fires breaking out in flash after glorious flash.” Then, “the boss is in town, waiting on the hilltop,” and we’re treated to a nostalgic scene. Then Watel delivers this line: “Before every game, the boss will sing our anthem, hand on his heart, to cover up his bald spot,” piercing our emotions because of its double take.

Each potion feels bigger than itself, making it easy to read into any piece as a microcosm of the whole collection’s theme. In “There I Was,” a cloud of bees “the very shape of my kneeling body” disturbs the narrator while at a garden party, “but nobody had seen a thing, not a one had looked up.” These layers lead to dimensionality of each potion and the book as a whole.

Watel’s incisive writing touches on internal states of idealized greatness mixed with people’s flaws. In “The Island,” Watel sketches a place that’s not literal, but shows how we’re mesmerized with the idea of perfection. In a piece called “The Skull on My Desk,” Watel uses humor to hold the heavy loss of the speaker’s father to suicide. The speaker banters with and then dismisses the skull. Then, “the skull said, Who are you to say what’s real?” This layered potion illuminates the gulf between who we are and who we should be.

Watel’s subtle subversions rely on deft word choices. The world she spins turns on one simple word from “Someday I Must Tell”: “Maybe you knew if you gave me the ring, you would have to be my mother.” This simple difference—that a man would be expected to mother a partner—creates shockwaves of awareness, opening up new perspectives.

Watel continues to subvert expectation with subtle choices in language from “We Return to the City”: “When we emerge into daylight again, the streets greet us with indifference, as if they’ve seen our kind before and know we’ll come around eventually, back to the rush, the shove, the slight waiting at throat’s edge.” While she hints at the common phrase “at knife’s edge,” her use of “throat” jolts the feeling right into the body.

Watel also makes effective use of narrative techniques. In the second “What Sounds” piece in the book, which considers the subject of patriarchy and its effects, the speaker reverse ages. This event and description beckons at natural childhood: “…your neck holding up your head like a sunflower’s stem, all your movements easy and painless, as if you’ve been released from gravity.” Conceptually turning young, while fathers and grandfathers do not, speaks multitudes.

In the strange times in which we currently live, where reality feels surreal and we as readers stumble in the fog of confusion, the Book of Potions meets us where we are. This collection’s diversion from straight surrealism, instead blending real and unreal, is the real potion we need to navigate our current internal and external landscapes.