The Stay Behind

Author: Serena Solin

Publisher: Beautiful Days Press (2023)

Serena Solin’s The Stay Behind is a book about autumn, though April also makes an appearance. Its poems trace psychogeographic and private histories from September 11, 2001 to a more recent solitudinous November. In their attempt to “speak open the perimeter” of a scarred metropolitan landscape, these poems roam rooftops and parks, subway tunnels, and improbable, “malfunctioning zones of the city,” collecting rhododendron, manioc, hellgrammite, and invisible trout.

In these architectural and linguistic pockmarks, gaps, and crevices, The Stay Behind locates a more indefinite experience: the “cattail marsh circumambulated/ by childhood’s footsteps” that lies beneath the parking lots of sense, a thorny wilderness of the imagination which has since been “mortgaged to a nationwide mall conglomerate.”

Hovering diffusely across taut lines, Solin salvages her own slantwise, archival music from the anxious “shutdown sequence of guest rooms" here in the "billowing year of zero magnitude.” With a nod to the new weather, Solin asks ancient questions: what is "the soundscape of the cold?" How do we live surrounded by conspiracy? Or, how to understand the "acrid tundras" of the criminal mind? In answer, The Stay Behind wades in the whispermist, the chilly waters that surround the human island, where masked sprites swim, and dream starts to freeze over.