Christopher Henry Smith
The Cryptid Inside
Robert Wood Lynn’s Mothman Apologia is the 2022 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize as selected by Rae Armantrout. Released in March, the book is available through Yale University Press and widely distributed in bookstores everywhere. As the winner of this prize is every year, Lynn’s volume has been much anticipated, and the hype—largely—holds up.
Lynn offers us a gallery of longing in his first collection, presenting poems only on alternate pages, isolating his careful formal decisions and diverse structures as hand-sized portraits of a speaker’s grief. Page after page startles with glorious arrangements of Yale New and Yale Display type crafted by Lynn (larger book design by Dustin Kilgore), and the order, the wide margins, the justified text, the relative symmetry of the verse reminds us repeatedly of the speaker’s meticulous quest for forgiveness, for a kind of control in the chaos of fire and addiction consuming his subjects. Pulsing within these delicate frames are Lynn’s words, largely in the voice of an Appalachian storyteller, stark and mesmerized with language. And, of course, the venture also assumes the guise of the red-eyed harbinger with whom Lynn seems to align his sins: the Mothman.
The Mothman persona poems make up one series peppered throughout the collection, all nimbly assigning the Mothman tasks as unlikely as Googling itself, watching National Treasure on TV, dabbling in etymology, and—not surprisingly given other interests of the text—getting high. Lynn seems to position the Mothman as an alternate version of himself, myth-cum-man sharing experiences of self but in the confines of West Virginia mythos, to an effect that resonates in a book obsessed with near-truth, retelling, allusion, tradition, and anecdote. The text invokes the lies of capitalism, the many myths that operate in grand American systems in 2022, and the crimes of the pharmaceutical industry. While it does so without many memorable insights, it does ably pair the crumbling country with histories and yarns of fire and failure throughout.
This is, perhaps, some of the most affecting work of the book: its many compelling narratives—those heard second hand from police officers, those excavated in history books, and the central story of a lost friend that makes up eleven elegies throughout the collection. These elegies, alongside the Mothman poems, drive the book forward and perform consistently engaging work: clever use of form, surprising reference points (Dante, sure; Muriel Rukeyser, no doubt; Larry Levis, how could we not; but Talladega Nights?), and the yearning that suffuses across the collection. We find a speaker who has lost the difference / between balm / and blame pressed / complicit into complacent, who must apologize for the bridge collapse, the temporary work alongside pharmaceutical execs, and the tragic fire that sent his best friend to the hospital (and, further, into a life of addiction).
These two longer thrust (Mothman and Fire / Oxy elegies), fuel additional themes of the work. Masculinity (the bruises on your chest heal faster than the ones on your pride). The pride and shame of homeplace (This town was the same and I would fight anybody—any body—that said so). The joy of language (a cat / who was named Lucy not after diamonds / but after cigarettes). And distance (the opening and closing image: how impossible it feels trying to point out a star to the person standing right beside you). The poems working between these two streams, however, operate with mixed success. In them, we find the chance to act with relative freedom, yielding some of the most introspective and lyrically dynamic selections in the text, but we also find a number that seem to be meeting page count, or that were pulled in without significant thought toward their relationship with the larger narrative and tone.
For its fascination with the written word and its attentive meditations on a smoldering home state, this is a collection worth a read. Lynn is in conversation with a wealth of experiences and ideas, and I look forward to seeing which ones he wants to explore next.