Difficult Animal: A Review

In Difficult Animal (Saddle Road Press), Lisa Lutwyche shows us the meat and bones of life, that difficult animal we all struggle with, full of love and confusion, with hidden teeth. This collection is a poetic memoir beginning with her childhood: talented parents, music they produced, and her young ache for love and acceptance.  However, just when I began to believe this would be the story of a girl and her family, I was brought up short.

This is no idyllic reverie; Lutwyche doesn’t shy away from life’s pain. The lessons of her grandmothers whose presence is a soft constant in the “Great-Grandmother Annetta” and “Gentle Watch,” are shattered by the violent death of a fawn whose eyes wouldn’t close. This poem, “Requiem for a Nuisance” brings ominous undertones of danger.

That danger does come in the form of domestic violence and then cancer. It was with the second section that I truly fell in love with this book. Here Lutwyche’s strength of language and willingness to write unflinchingly grow in power. She too won’t close her eyes but instead faces whatever comes. In “Invisible,” she bravely claims:

so if I am

         invisible

let me twirl

         around your faces

laughing

        teasing

let me dance naked

and shout

forbidden dreams

Dance and shout she does. Lutwyche uses multiple points of view in her poems as if she holds life in her hands, turning it over and over to view it from every angle. Images of hands appear repeatedly throughout this book: a father’s whose hands held the power to move hearts, violent hands of an abusive husband and a new love whose touch / heals. But the most important hands are those of this brave poet, wielding her pen. In “Brewing the Witch” She stirs in the deep secret / of her untapped strength…brews the witch / she needs to be. And this reader is glad she did. 

Available on Amazon.