Tributaries: A Beautiful Opportunity to Lose Our Way

BY BRICE MAIURRO

The first thing I heard in these poems was a heartbeat. In his opening poem “All Water Has Perfect Memory”, an allusion to a Toni Morrison line, the rhythm for me was that same rhythm at the start of Dark Side of the Moon. The book begins with the sense of a heartbeat growing louder and louder each moment. Everett’s first collection of poetry, Tributaries, continues to carry that heartbeat, and the sorrow between its beats, throughout this literary confluence of moments. Moments among a greater sense of we, the ecological we.

In his poetry, Everett’s time is the earth’s time. These poems are not contained to the one-hundred-ish years of a human life but zoomed out and slowed down. They connect us to a very clear something greater than our singular journey as a human being on this planet. It is hard to tell where he ends and the rest of Mother Earth begins. He reminds us of this truth for all of us. The poems are in conversation with one another, compounding the complex yet approachable mezclado of this book. The Osage dance with the Cottonwoods dancing with the stream below them, all tributaries feeding into the heart of this poet. Everett is spellcasting here; calling in the healing of the earth and sounding the cautionary canary for its woes. 

In addition to spellcaster, Everett serves as field guide, death doula, and eternal student in these poems. These poems are “always hungry” to listen more. In these poems, our fellow living beings, the Great Horned Owl, Coyote, the Bison, are much more teacher than metaphor. There is an admirable equanimity in Everett’s work (and play). He explores the distance between here and home, where home is the same home we find in “eco-”. Everett, as are we, is water, in the words of Toni Morrison, “trying to get back to where it once was”.

“Poets, remember to listen”, says Everett in “Populus deltoides”, “to breathe in the vanilla of resin”. Everett has a knack for imagery (see lines like: “blue hunger”; “cloudless teeth”). He sets scenes magically, and then returns to the reader in a very direct and curious way, as if it were a conversation over a cup of shade grown coffee. I find the agrarian salt-of-the-earth wisdom of these poems reminiscent of Wendell Berry, a fellow poet captivated by the rural. Everett himself is from the “windtossed flatlands of southeast Kansas”, which he visits often in this collection. The poems are biography; confessional poetry of the landscapes and experiences that shaped him and his words. 

The poem “Geraniums” in particular stood out to me, with visceral lines like “a blackbird flies backwards from tinted window”. In very intentional moments, Everett captures the core of surrealism: not to immerse the reader in a dream, but to attempt to liberate our colonized minds. Everett has a poetic conviction. When he says “it is better to speak in chrysanthemums”, he speaks from experience. He “plants the seeds in the mouths of everyone” he meets.

Shorter poems like “Pine Trees Covered in Snow” show us that Everett can be potent while being concise. These interludes to longer readings act as heartpunches, steering the collection along.

I often have a hard time with questions posed in poetry, finding them to be navel-gazing or overdramatic shenanigans, however I found myself enamoured of the questions Everett poses. Questions like “Do horses hide in my blonde waves?” where the goal seems not to send you into a philosophical spiral but to invite you into the great curiosity and wonder of this poet. Phrases like “amanita dreams” have me asking my own questions with that same curiosity – what is an amanita dream? What colors would I find there? What shamanic doors can be opened by being more curious about the world of our fungi friends?

In the words of our Colorado Poet Laureate, Andrea Gibson, “it hurts to become”; this collection pushes through the pain of the Anthropocene becoming something more alive, revealing limbs reaching for a better world. The poems in this collection are never so binary to choose to be a meditation on climate grief or to choose to elevate the natural world. They are a both/and, a queering, an honesty. There is a beautiful disobedience that Everett encourages us to join him for, where we too “ignore the no trespassing warnings”, “follow the river” and lose our way.

Purchase “Tributaries” by Aspen Everett

Brice Maiurro (he/they) is the Editor-in-Chief of South Broadway Press. Hailing from Lakewood, CO., he is the author of four collections of poetry, including Stupid Flowers and The Heart is an Undertaker Bee. His poetry has been published by South Florida Poetry Journal, Denverse, The Denver Post, Boulder Weekly, Suspect Press, and Poets Reading the News. Website: www.maiurro.co