SIFT, Alissa Hattman. The Third Thing Press, c/o Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122, 2023, 120 pages, $24.00 paper, www.the3rdthing.press.
Dedicated to the author’s mother, Sift by Alissa Hattman is the story of leaving a mother behind, of seeking safety, and of climate despair. The narrator escapes her life in a damaged world by joining The Driver. Together they head overland to water, to sand, to stone, to river to desert to mountain to shore and to green. They eat squash and cactus and a strawberry oat bar. They ride in a truck, a dune buggy, a helicopter over a dystopian landscape. They walk. They discover the color purple. They thirst, sip, and know freedom in a feverdream journey. They dig and dig.
The narrator recalls her past, her childhood, her grandmother, and her relationship with the time before, the ruin of everything. She talks to her mother:
…I think of you, Mother, and wonder whether you would have lived this way too, had you known it was possible, and if you had known, whether we, as women, might have thrived like moss, parts and parcels. Now, as we’ve traveled through day and night and through dayless, nightless dark, I’ve grown hints of you up my back and have not always known if it is a comfort or a burden. Perhaps it is both.
Though it’s been a long time, I am reminded of Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat, who also flounders through a marvelous and off-kilter world, a surreal nightmare made beautiful in this grown woman’s visioning. Prose poetry as much as rich narrative, the narrator tells her mother how she takes the opportunity to leave and discovers who else she can be, and the fierce and fearsome memories she continues to carry.
And then I remember that we have never been safe.
Language greets art and retreats from documentary, flows over passage from one reality to another. Hattman’s prose in these brief vignettes is lush and evocative, clear as crystal and precious as the view backward into a past that is lost. What comes next is possibility. Beautiful underbrush concealing the bare soil in which our hearts grow.
Alternating with the narration are brief observations of the surviving natural world, of plants, creatures, stones, the debris of what we call civilization and the wild things that carry on in their own individual wisdom.
FIREFLY A light inside skin. Light for light’s sake. Seed light. Breeze light. Light lost. Light without fire. Conscious light. Patient light. Light settling, slowing, silencing. Light dimming. Always, the skin. Stillness. Light dimming. Night dipping. Skin shifting. A scratch, an opening into the beautiful darkness.
Cosmos might be the flower or of the universe. Three small stones, swallowed or held tightly, held to ward off fear. Then, a horrible accident—we survive.
We come to the dunes. An impossible forever of alabaster sand rolling in ever-shifting mounds from here to nowhere. The wind writes stretch marks on the land. Sun, blinding.
Men are dangerous. In a memory from when she was sixteen: I hear you laughing, laughing, then I hear you scream. She returns again and again to memory.
Sometimes I think about our house, Mother. I open the door and then I open another door and then I go down the stairs and around a corner and into the shocked silence that left me vacant, cold. And then I remember that we have never been safe.
Two people search for fertile soil, a place to plant and grow food, a place to live. Along the way they forage for food and water and the truth about themselves. They quarrel, and tell stories, and starve. No easy answers. The Driver becomes many, becomes Lamellae, becomes L, becomes savior, becomes friend, becomes feared enemy, and becomes magic. L speaks the narrator’s name, Tortula, a genus of mosses. L asks for Tortula’s help.
This is a story of regret and rupture, grief and striving, tears and hope. My heart turns over. How do we face the unremembered truth? How can we possibly heal, go on? And then she says anything alive brings me comfort. Trapped together, they dig their way up and loose the earth to water and wind..
Jan Priddy’s writing has earned an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship, Arts & Letters fellowship, Pushcart nomination, and numerous publications. An MFA graduate from Pacific University, her debut utopian novel, All the Daughters Sing, launches from Ooligan Press in February 2026. She blogs at IMPERFECT PATIENCE: https://janpriddyoregon.wordpress.com.