Space Struck
Paige Lewis
Reviewed by Gwen Mauroner
In their debut poetry collection Space Struck, Paige Lewis trains the reader’s eye to see differently, expanding views of beauty and fixing the gaze in wonder. Resisting miracles where others might usually think to look: “The miracle here / is not that these women swallowed light,” Lewis finds them instead where we often look away—in the grotesque and unsettling: “A miracle is anything that God forgot / to forbid.”
Through startling images—minnows swimming through sludge, a purple finch stuck to the grill of a car, a pelican devouring a seagull, a gray paste in the waters of Lake Michigan—Lewis questions how our gaze impacts nature. What happens when we don’t look? What happens when we do? What happens when our vision is fuzzy around the edges? Where should we focus? What hides just at the edge of our sight? They use illusion, imagination, and alternate realities to explore the limits of our own world: “I’m sure there’s an alternate // universe where my gaze is unwavering . . . where / I don’t hate documentarians for letting nature be // its gruesome self.” For every gruesome image, there is equally as much grace and tenderness. Lewis wonders what God’s role might be, examines faith and hope, reminds us: “We holy our own fragments / when we can.”
Embracing both humor and prayer, Lewis breaks barriers between nature and humanity—bringing nature into our homes, onto our front porches—while examining how every-day life is changing and what we stand to lose in a time defined by climate change: “Every experience seems both urgent and / unnatural—like right now, this train // is approaching the station where my beloved / is waiting to take me to the orchard, so we can // pay for the memory of having once, at dusk, / plucked real apples from real trees.” Space Struck, like the meteorite in the title poem, leaves a lasting impression, filling the one struck with wonder.