Loosen
Loosen
by Kyle Potvin, Hobblebush Books, $18.00.
Illness can drastically alter one’s perception of life, death, and what defines us. It catalyzes you into a philosophical and psychological transformation. This is intimately and gracefully explored in Loosen, a collection of poetry by breast cancer survivor Kyle Potvin.
The book is divided into five sections. Each section is introduced by a fragment with the idea of knots as a common theme. A woman’s knots are too tight, unable to “loosen”. She has tried to remove them and has even consulted a Shaman to assist her, but they remain taut and unyielding. Section one reveals that she wears “these knots daily”. They bring her nothing but entrapment. The reader doesn’t discover until the end that the fragments make up a single poem, titled “Loosen”. It’s a clear, and beautiful, metaphor for being haunted by her own mortality. Potvin’s acknowledgment of life as fragile came at the cost of existing in the present. She had to break free from the taunting of death and appreciate life while it lasts to, finally, loosen.
Some poems directly deal with Potvin’s cancer. She employs direct language that makes readers understand the seriousness of how her health was. Its rawness and vulnerability are admirable and worthy of applause. In “Going Under” (26), hospital machines distance Potvin from her physical body and uproot her from reality:
Each week, they hooked me up and dripped a drug into my vein that took me to a world
where everything was gone: no light, no sound, nor even recollection of breath.
Passage of time runs fluidly and suddenly in Potvin’s work. She jumps through different points of her life and looks at them through an introspective lens. Her execution of this makes readers realize just how quick and temporary the state of things are. Having cancer put Potvin in an existential situation where the depth of it was fully realized. Various poems such as “Lesson From the Naughty Chair” (18) highlight this:
Don’t touch the floor until you think about what you have done. What have you done? You think this chair is pretty.
You are sorry now.
Throughout Potvin’s collection of poems, she demonstrates interest in religion. Does it give us a false sense of hope and purpose? What does it mean to worship God if it is God that created sickness, war, and despair? A lot of the time, Potvin is simply confused. There are too many questions and not enough answers. Our minds might not even be able to comprehend such an intricate predicament. In “God Looks Down At 3 A.M.” (51), Potvin concerns herself with God and the absurdities of life:
This world is pain, do I have to say it? Who created it? Think hard about that.
You lie, false corpses. Arms, fallen soldiers. I see you are tired. Me too. Exhausted.
Not all of Potvin’s poems carry a heavy weight. She has the range to also establish a whimsical tone and to paint a bright picture of a future that, at one point, she couldn’t imagine was possible. In “Advice For My Future Granddaughter When I Give Her Diamond Earrings For Her 25th Birthday” (56), Potvin fully relishes in something as simple as the idea of being a grandmother and refuses to let her health conditions get the best of her. The poem also alludes to the circle of life and being able to pass down wisdom at an older age:
On your birthday, do not drink four martinis,
with a friend at the American Hotel bar in Sag Harbor although it is such a literary place
and someone else is paying.
Though Loosen is personal, its content resonates with current issues we face today. Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States. People have increasingly had to face illness and death with the COVID-19 pandemic. We could attempt to ignore these issues, but its omnipresence makes it difficult to do that. So, we are left to figure out how to live with it. How to reconfigure our understanding of the world and each other. How to make peace with what we know and don’t know. If you don’t know where to start, take a page from Potvin’s work.
Lily Alvarado
Lily Alvarado (she/her) was born and raised in The Bronx, New York. Currently, she is an undergraduate student attending SUNY Plattsburgh. There, she majors in English Literature and Gender and Women's Studies and is completing her certification in Professional Writing. When she's not working on an assignment, she can be found doing yoga, taking long walks in nature, or caring for her bearded dragon, Riley.