Between Now and "the Apocalypse": Alexandra McIntosh Reviews The Shore by Chris Nealon
The publication of Chris Nealon’s The Shore in early 2020 absolutely confirms the coy generosity of my poetic guardian angel. I first encountered the collection just before the global emergence of COVID-19, and have returned to its pages often through the following months—months that I, like so many people, have offhandedly dubbed apocalyptic. Nealon would likely correct my melodrama by pointing out, as he does in the book, “There’s gonna be a lot more fronting about ‘the apocalypse’ between now / and the apocalypse.” Nevertheless, this book has proved a great companion during these uncertain times, settling me down into the heart of life, down past an oppressive, consumerist violence and into a perennial hopefulness that is at once pragmatic and “a little mystical.” Far from naive, the work is wryly self-aware, assuring the reader, “just because I have tremendous faith in people doesn’t mean I think / we’re going to win.”
The work is split into five sections, the middle three deconstructing, respectively, gender, race, and capital. The opening poem deposits us directly into the action: “Then came fire.” This inferno carries on throughout the collection with scenes of climate disaster, class war, a violent end to capital, and intimate grapplings with the speaker’s own privilege and the threat it poses to those around him. We leave the first poem on a haunting but familiar note: “And in the great transition no one could tell if we were doomed or free.”
In a deeply intersectional quest for liberation, Nealon, a white gay man, reveals his timidities and acknowledges the potential harm in considering his own oppression, confessing, “I don’t want to make it worse.” Astute self-critiques, pop culture references, and disarming humor fill the book with both levity and depth. Challenging the foundational binary of us/them, Nealon confesses, “I’m dismayed that the default setting for ‘gay white guy’ somehow remains ‘petty bourgeois,’” even while admitting his desire to redeem masculinity.
I realize it’s preposterous to pit my entire life against the tidal swells
of the history of gender,
It’s like scorning wealth—
But every day in graceful carriage I can see it all undone so easily,
If only we’d all undo it—
The reader rocks back and forth with the assertion that reform of current social systems is possible—and easy!— if only…. Soft punctuation is rampant in this volume, mirroring the tangential threads introduced by social concerns. Poetry seems the most logical medium with which to present these heady considerations, just as queerness seems the best answer for the oppression of patriarchy.
White Meadows, the book’s section that deconstructs race and privilege, begins with a powerful quote from the poet Heriberto Yépez. The speaker says, “Or I as remember reading it, ‘What is up with white poets and / meadows?’” These pages go on to detail a near-idyllic childhood full of suburbs, bike rides, and— you guessed it— meadows. There is an undercurrent, however, of the precariousness upon which this ideal rests.
The rejected awareness that your whole life was built, as
your parents’ lives were, on the backs of others elsewhere—
And that your suffering while not less real for this did not in
the least exonerate you from supporting the design by
which an infinite misery was built up to cushion you—
The history of the [American] dream’s design—
That’s the history of your becoming white—
Nealon admits that the threat of violence, especially for a gay child, was always looming; that this very threat keeps us from challenging the status quo and that our fear of the other is only outdone by our fear of becoming the other. Perhaps, then, it is our desperate hold on safety, on belonging, that keeps us writing about meadows. “It’s like there’s a scrap of glory in me I was asked to keep safe while / the world goes to hell.” In the midst of these existential wanderings, Nealon’s speakers find themselves struggling to humanize the others: “Relying on an image of the courage of the oppressed is just a way / to say godspeed and be done with them—// “Them”// Ethics, fuck.”
We learn in this section that the writer and activist Yépez has decided to stop writing poetry, instead writing prose and working for change, making the disparity of privilege all the more pronounced. Nealon asks his readers to consider what is to be done with privilege. Should no poetry be written at all? And he makes the gut-punching declaration to his fellow poet and human Heriberto that, “I would have liked to ride bikes with you / But you were busy having the childhood that afforded mine.”
Is capital to blame for these inequalities? This is the assumption on which Nealon rests the fourth section, titled, like the book, The Shore. Capital, the speaker insists, is not natural.
Capital’s not predation—your predator wants to eat you—
Capital wants your life—and if you get in its way it wants you dead
No more than that—
It wants you to think you deserve to die
We see throughout the book Nealon’s hope for his son and all future generations—those young people who see past our strict ideas of gender and attachment to capitalism. Speaking to them, he is emboldened by them. Nealon tells his son to never forget that “the death-pulse of commodities is just an imitation of the waves / that pass through us.” Capitalism is a counterfeit; what’s real is beyond. This beyond is both spiritual and sensual, “breathing… a moment…the green world… the immaterial sponginess that makes the bankers and the poets both go unhhh.” This beyond is where Nealon’s affection leads him, out beyond the shore, beyond the border: “My son—// I felt you mimic it // There was no shore, and you and I were swimming.” And Nealon is hopeful we’ll join him out there as well, “since so few of us are / actually profiting from this state of affairs.”
What I found to be most comforting in this work was Nealon’s explanation of desire. In the final section, he sheds his shame “for thinking what I hunger for is what / they want from me.” He realizes that our pull toward commodities, and the binaries they foster, is not something to be ashamed of; capitalism has counterfeited our deepest desires. Our myths of capitalism, our construction of in-groups and out-groups, betray our foundations, our desire to belong. Like Rumi says, what we seek is seeking us, we need only to rest in the reality that we all already belong. Our societal constructions will fade away, but we will always belong. Justice means acknowledging everyone’s belonging and tearing down the walls we’ve constructed to keep others out of the meadow. Our struggle for a beloved community might be flailing, but “it’s waving not drowning.”