Consider the Body, Winged by Jessica E. Pierce

In Consider the Body, Winged, we meet someone very special even before the first poem begins. It’s Pierce’s nine-year-old self, to whom she dedicates this book: Thank you for being brave enough to say, I am a poet. Here is our first book. I love you.

Following a genuinely adorable intro, the poems naturally lift and vibrate. We are swept up in the deeply personal pieces, but not in an ungentle or self-centered hijacking. What I appreciated right away, and throughout the collection, is how Pierce establishes a level of intimacy for the reader, who can securely bask in the ideas and images of the poems.

Pierce creates the kind of experience a reader can actually enjoy—there’s not a tedious moment to be had. Even touching on the difficult subjects, including climate crisis, postpartum depression, incarceration, and death, Pierce navigates easily through highly lyrical poems as well as the more stabilizing narratives, thus resulting in a highly satisfying read.  

Many of Pierce’s poems are infused with the richness of science, a layer I found especially captivating, seamlessly blending the animal and elemental worlds. Bees, wasps, and birds populate her lines alongside trees, water, weather, and even the vastness of space. Inevitably these natural and cosmic landscapes give rise to profound metaphysical questions: Who am I? What should I desire? What does it all mean? In her exploration Pierce neither shies away from the inquiry nor relinquishes her pursuit of understanding.

She is exactly strong enough for what she needs to do. She doesn’t burn.

Pierce invites us into her world through the lenses of a girl, mother, partner, daughter, and creature of the Earth. Her vulnerability is raw and deeply felt—a poet unafraid to plead with her own heart to shield her children from harm. In “Augur”she writes:

We do know
shattered earth
[…]
Is the world
calling to be pillaged?
[…]
We need
a high priestess,
someone to read
the guts
of a strong bird,
to understand how
the ash drifts
up to the dimming,
darkening sky.

Pierce reminds us of life’s fragility, its precarious balance, and the wounds we inflict on ourselves and our planet. In the face of estrangement, ecological despair, and human disconnection, she responds with instinctive grace, grounding her vision in the feminine archetype: the queen, the nurturer, the mother.

In “A visitation” the poet describes childbirth:

I thought it would feel
something like the rumble
of massive sharp-toothed
tools spinning out open sky
above a clear cut.
Or like an earthquake, tumbling
the stones that men in my family stacked
and hoped would always stand.
Instead, the morning
teems, falls
silent.
And then I’m holding
a small squalling being,
bare and smooth and feely
in the world, wearing the pleasure
and pain of not knowing such
tunnels of color, and my body
is all myself,
and I let out
a grassy cry.

Pierce meets fear and pain with truth and resilience, often looking to the non-humans who exemplify strength: the bumblebees, wasps, and hummingbirds. In “I propose we worship the mud dauber,” Pierce admires the wasp: sets of wings to carry her and her earth. / She is exactly strong enough / for what she needs to do. She doesn’t burn.

A favorite among the narrative poems is “Finding my copy of The Children’s Book of Saints,” a fourteen-line poem constructed in couplets, dedicated to Pierce’s father. In it she describes reenacting communion as a child: We cut into Wonder Bread with bottle caps / to make scallop-edged communion, always took turns / as the priest and the parishioner. Emerging from the childhood memory, the poet breaks out to speak presently: If I knew you now, I’d tell you how one day I opened the door / and said yes to carrying nothing but my own self. / That we were, and are, altar enough.

Throughout, Pierce shows the same respect for desperation as she does assuredness, it seems. It’s unsettling but also validating to witness the understandable paranoia that surrounds the daily life of a woman who fears for her planet, her children and family, and herself. 

I love the voice/voices of every being inside these visual, visceral poems. In “We all have our work to do,”she is literally cut open by a surgeon who, in his work, has power over every body. A priest and missionaries also claim power over the body while they hold superstitions over reason, ignore the mezuzah at eye level / … the 21st century discoveries…. The poet is not convinced, but seeing the world as an interconnected system, she writes, We all have our work to do, don’t we. Even with the missionaries at her door, the poet remains embodied: Watch me close the door, with all its particles firmly / in place, and return to my room, firm-footed. Watch me take / as much pleasure as I can in the work of consecrating / these always released and releasing cells we call a body.

If I knew you now, I’d tell you how one day I opened the door and said yes to carrying nothing but my own self.

When a poet can see herself, save herself, and return for anyone who may have been left behind, it is a testament to the transformative power of poetry as a vessel for self-realization, healing, and communal connection. It seems this is what Pierce set out to do. In the final poem (“My daughter asks me about her breast buds, and I don’t want to fuck this up because what if they had told me that this is what a body can do and it’s beauty?”), she is a mother with a message to be passed down to her daughter:

Listen for what
could be insects casting their bodies into air,
or seed pots bursting open. Look
for the doe who has tucked herself under
the low, glowing branches of an apple tree
in this wing-brimmed meadow. You
are dusk and dust and deserving.

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Debbra Palmer is a writer from Portland, OR. Her work is published in journals and publications, including CALYX Journal, Portland Review, Cream City Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, Passenger’s Journal, Northwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and The New York Journal of Books. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University.