Issa Lewis reviews Mining for Stardust
Issa M. Lewis is the author of Infinite Collisions (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and Anchor (Aldrich Press, forthcoming in 2022). She is the 2013 recipient of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and a runner-up for the 2017 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize. Her poems have previously appeared or are forthcoming in Rust+Moth, Thimble, North American Review, The Banyan Review, and Panoply, amongst others
Mining for Stardust by Kai Coggin
The last two years have left us all sifting through the wreckage of a shattered normalcy, digging deeply to find whatever inspiration we can to keep ourselves emotionally grounded. Kai Coggin takes us through this unparalleled time in American history in Mining for Stardust, in which Coggin walks the reader through her experience of 2020 and early 2021, through a global pandemic, the struggle for racial equality and police accountability, a controversial presidential election, and its aftermath. What makes this collection unique, however, is the raw, honest lens of emotion through which Coggin views this landscape—feelings that resonate with so many of her readers as we navigate our own uncertain present.
The collection opens with a world thrust into chaos; the speaker, and we readers, are living through the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet even as “…our country is a sinking ship / and the ocean is already in our lungs,” there is a moment of stillness in the first poem of the collection, “A Poet’s Balcony Aria in the Apocalypse.” The sense of uncertainty is palpable in this poem, as is the speaker’s desire to cling to the hope that we, as a people, will be able to right the proverbial ship and pull out of the pandemic in the end—that we will be victorious, just as the tenor singing Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma.”
One of the most beautiful aspects of this collection is the poet’s intense relationship with the natural world. Many poems include gardening as a theme—planting seeds, the most fundamental act of optimism, particularly in the pandemic-ravaged world the speaker inhabits. Of particular note is when these moments tie in the speaker’s relationship with her wife, as it does in “Planting Seeds and Tasting Flowers During the End of Days”:
I plunge my finger into the soil in precise but artistic regions following the course of the meticulous color mapping and drop the little dreams of harvest into their respective holes…
and I will just add this to the infinite list of moments of beauty she creates and cultivates with me and we smile at each other as we push these little hopes into the earth (8)
However, the natural world also brings pain, mirroring the speaker’s grief over the many lives lost during the global pandemic. In “Baby Blues,” the speaker describes a bluebird nest constructed in the rain gutter of her home. She watches the little family grow with great anticipation, only to have the baby birds drowned after a heavy rain:
Nature is cruel sometimes, Kai
my lover says from the window and I weep into the morning, resurrection denied, rolling away the stone of day to find three dead blue babies downy and gone, still beautiful in their almosting
and this is not an image I wanted to send out into this day, but it’s a reminder that sometimes, out of nowhere everything can get washed away (29).
This speaks to the ways so many of us felt blindsided and helpless in early 2020 by the events unfolding around us. The speaker grieves the baby birds as we grieved our own losses, large and small. However, this connection with the earth that helps the speaker travel through a difficult year. As the spring of 2021 approaches and the collection draws to a close, the speaker turns to the natural world’s annual rebirth as an opportunity for humanity to also grow in “Harbingers of This Particular Spring”:
…it’s not just the frogs and flowers returning, not just the nesting birds fledgling their way into flight, not just the newly planted vegetable seeds singing possibility to the empty tables, but the harbingers are heralding the cusp of our lives returning, the world we once knew equinoxing into something we have yet to behold… (99)
Overall, Mining for Stardust by Kai Coggins delves deeply into a year in all of our lives that left us struggling to find peace, and she digs up a true sense of hope for us all. It is a deeply gratifying read in such uncertain times, allowing us to “turn our faces toward the sun / and let in all the Light.”
The collection opens with a world thrust into chaos; the speaker, and we readers, are living through the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet even as “…our country is a sinking ship / and the ocean is already in our lungs,” there is a moment of stillness in the first poem of the collection, “A Poet’s Balcony Aria in the Apocalypse.” The sense of uncertainty is palpable in this poem, as is the speaker’s desire to cling to the hope that we, as a people, will be able to right the proverbial ship and pull out of the pandemic in the end—that we will be victorious, just as the tenor singing Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma.”
One of the most beautiful aspects of this collection is the poet’s intense relationship with the natural world. Many poems include gardening as a theme—planting seeds, the most fundamental act of optimism, particularly in the pandemic-ravaged world the speaker inhabits. Of particular note is when these moments tie in the speaker’s relationship with her wife, as it does in “Planting Seeds and Tasting Flowers During the End of Days”:
I plunge my finger into the soil in precise but artistic regions following the course of the meticulous color mapping and drop the little dreams of harvest into their respective holes…
and I will just add this to the infinite list of moments of beauty she creates and cultivates with me and we smile at each other as we push these little hopes into the earth (8)
However, the natural world also brings pain, mirroring the speaker’s grief over the many lives lost during the global pandemic. In “Baby Blues,” the speaker describes a bluebird nest constructed in the rain gutter of her home. She watches the little family grow with great anticipation, only to have the baby birds drowned after a heavy rain:
Nature is cruel sometimes, Kai
my lover says from the window and I weep into the morning, resurrection denied, rolling away the stone of day to find three dead blue babies downy and gone, still beautiful in their almosting
and this is not an image I wanted to send out into this day, but it’s a reminder that sometimes, out of nowhere everything can get washed away (29).
This speaks to the ways so many of us felt blindsided and helpless in early 2020 by the events unfolding around us. The speaker grieves the baby birds as we grieved our own losses, large and small. However, this connection with the earth that helps the speaker travel through a difficult year. As the spring of 2021 approaches and the collection draws to a close, the speaker turns to the natural world’s annual rebirth as an opportunity for humanity to also grow in “Harbingers of This Particular Spring”:
…it’s not just the frogs and flowers returning, not just the nesting birds fledgling their way into flight, not just the newly planted vegetable seeds singing possibility to the empty tables, but the harbingers are heralding the cusp of our lives returning, the world we once knew equinoxing into something we have yet to behold… (99)
Overall, Mining for Stardust by Kai Coggins delves deeply into a year in all of our lives that left us struggling to find peace, and she digs up a true sense of hope for us all. It is a deeply gratifying read in such uncertain times, allowing us to “turn our faces toward the sun / and let in all the Light.”
