Fight or Flight: Poems by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Fight or Flight: Poems by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
• Michael J. Beilfuss

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, Fight or Flight: Poems. College Station, TX: Stephen F. Austin State UP, 2023. 88 pp. Paper, $18.

The poems in Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum's third collection, Fight or Flight, provide a loosely connected narrative of a "Broken White-Boy Heart" (as one of the poems is titled) that wades through a [End Page 195] slough of painful memories and desires before finally embarking, with some trepidation, into a new life and love. The book is divided into three named sections. The first, "Forgiveness," largely exposes the aftermath of divorce. The second section, "The Unborn," investigates encapsulated memories from throughout life, while also addressing a long-held fantasy of imagined future children—the "unborn" of the section title. The children were never generated because, as the speaker announces to one imagined unborn child, he "failed to find / A mother with whom to make you" ("Confession" 8–9). The final section, "Beautiful Dreams," suggests reconciliation and the certainty that comes with newfound love. The three imagined unborn children find their substance in the three stepchildren that enlarge a new love and marriage. In the poem "Lure" the speaker professes, "You are the last woman / I will love" (32–33).

The collection features a complex structure; a structure that is far more intricate than the above summary indicates. Throughout the book the poems refer back (or forward) to each other, enriching the experience of reading the entire work as one piece, rather than simply a collection of a poet's latest work. Each poem can stand alone, but they are all enhanced by their careful placement in the whole. There is a picture on McFadyen-Ketchum's website that depicts what appears to be a manuscript (the manuscript of this collection?) neatly laid out in three rows on a hardwood floor before a fireplace, with a pile of pages in the shadows waiting to be placed or discarded. The image suggests something of the care that went into organizing this work and its soft-spoken narrative. Later poems in the book illuminate earlier poems; the earlier poems seem to call forth the later poems. It's more than simply verbal echoes; there are refashionings and reimaginings of the memories and guilt and desires that the poet needles and examines throughout the collection.

Many of the poems are deeply melancholic, especially in the first two sections. For example, "Sea Lions" provides a memory of the harmony and familiarity, practiced and unpracticed, that can develop in an intimate, long-term relationship. But the speaker situates the memory a "decade before he finally gave up" on the relationship (31). The cherished moment is undercut and becomes a sharp reproach in hindsight. A number of the poems contain such internalized, biting self-critique that refashion fond memories into particular rebukes. [End Page 196]

The story these poems tell feels deeply personal; one may even say confessional. The speaker mentions conversations with a therapist and reveals contemplations of suicide. The passage of time is often rendered through its relation to the date of divorce. In two of the poems the poet's voice admonishes itself, saying in "Whooping Crane" that waking from hard dreams is "nothing / Anyone wants to read about" (3–4), and in "Broken White-Boy Heart" that he should "Write about important things, anything, Sweet / Jesus, but yourself" (3–4; emphasis original). But it is exactly McFadyen-Ketchum's exploration of the self and its many fragmented and reconstituted parts that make this collection of poems what it is.

As much as the collection features painful internal explorations, it yearns for the wholeness of belonging, and finds recompense for those deep hurts to the soul not only with newfound love but also with glimpses of the incredible beauty and wonder of the natural world. The flora and fauna of the earth, as well as the whirling mass of the Milky Way, all contribute to moments of insight and an appreciation of the magnificence of creation. The title of the collection, along with the cover art of redwing blackbirds, betoken a sense of danger and adrenaline, but McFadyen-Ketchum...