Liz Whiteacre is the author of Hit the Ground (Finishing Line Press) and co-editor of the anthology Monday Coffee & Other Stories of Mothering Children with Special Needs (INwords Press). Her poetry has appeared in Disability Studies Quarterly, Wordgathering, Kaleidoscope, Breath & Shadow, Last Leaves, The Scores, Flying Island, and other magazines. Whiteacre is an associate professor of English at the University of Indianapolis where she teaches creative writing and publishing, as well as advises Etchings Press. She is a 2022-2024 CAC-CICOA Research Fellow, with the UIndy Center for Aging and Community and CICOA: Aging & In-Home Solutions, researching connections between poetry and aging gracefully.

Review of Tourist (Sea Crow Press, April 2023)

By Professor Liz Whiteacre

In TAK Erzinger’s latest poetry collection, Tourist (Sea Crow Press, April 2023), readers travel with the poet on many paths, exploring unconditional love and familial bonds. The first poem opens “I was raised as a spectator” (“Living in the Big Top,” 1), and Erzinger’s metaphor of being objects her parents juggled during her childhood serves as a foundation not only for her early understanding of family, but also her sense of being an observer of relationships and the sometimes-frustrating distance she feels from both the people closest to her and from the cultures she inherited. The poem ends “I am no longer silent” (1), and Erzinger’s bold promise kicks off a journey to understand abandonment, involuntary childlessness, and unconditional love. It’s Erzinger’s apt metaphors, imagery, and form that help navigate, and her insights about what constitutes family keeps us turning pages to see what she will discover.

As an educator and poet, I appreciated Erzinger’s attention to metaphor and imagery throughout the collection. Each moment grounds the emotion she unpacks, helping me process what family means and relate this understanding to my own life. For example, in “Empty” (6)

Never left behind in the manner of

a snail shell abandoned at the lip of a garden

lying open, a cavity, exposed.

Erzinger helps us understand the emptiness felt at being abandoned by sharing a concrete image that most of readers can picture clearly, having likely seen an abandoned garden snail shell in our lives. She makes us consider the emptiness of that cavity, the life that no longer inhabits it, the potential for the home cast aside, and what it means if it is not reused. Providing us this relatable detail and time to consider its implications, helps us understand what the emptiness is not for the speaker, so we better understand what the feeling of abandonment is to the speaker: rather than an empty cavity, waiting, perhaps, to be filled (which leaves me a sense of hope), it is a foundation, now faulty, compacted with memories and family stuffs that are breaking apart, like the aged tooth filling or weathered concrete that never properly set (which leaves me wondering if repairing the foundation is worth the time, energy, and resources).

Left behind

little relics comprised of flesh and bone from a marriage,

a filling that once kept the foundation in place.

Readers and poets can learn from Erzinger’s metaphor and imagery (here and in many other examples in the collection). Offering specific details in a poem that deepen its message creates moments that resonate with readers. Though we may not have shared experiences, we can appreciate what Erzinger has learned and passes on to help us navigate our own relationships and perhaps better appreciate what our loved ones might be going through. The collection offers many opportunities for us to reflect on how we can communicate complex feelings with relatable images and metaphors.

I also admired Erzinger’s attention to form in Tourist. She is a guide who is experienced with pacing and manipulates each poem’s structure to allow us time to appreciate and process moments both unsettling and joyful. Just as each place we visit as tourists is unique, Erzinger’s forms pair meaningfully with their subjects. The slow couplets in “Big Game” (28-29), underscore her and her husband’s commitment to redefining their family:

Too beguiled to budge

and find another,

our bodies create

a different beast-

we brave our future

side-by-side

“The Dead of Night” (34) offers caesuras that mimic the breath of an insomniac self-soothing:

Maybe I won’t make it back by daybreak

wishes bloom encouraged by stars

moonlight stains my face as I fight back sleep

longing for a creature of comfort

to sit out the night.

The quick, fast-paced “Forecast” (55-56) that doesn’t give readers as much time to breathe helps us understand the anxiousness the speaker feels before a deep breath, realization, in the poem’s last line:

Like stars, or slowing growing trees the end will not be seen

by this generation but its growth can sustain the future.

A force of nature. Unstoppable. You cannot escape it.

Readers will appreciate that the landscape in Tourist is varied, unpredictable and engaging, and poets will find many models of poetic techniques to add to their toolboxes. It is always a delight to discover that a collection offers not only life lessons that I can apply to my own life, but also craft that inspires me to experiment in my own poetry.

We’ve already journeyed with Erzinger through landscapes of PTSD, mental health, nature, and culture in past collections—she’s an excellent travelling companion. Tourist offers us another opportunity to learn how to heal from trauma by embracing the understand that we are made of our traumas—each obstacle we overcome, every itinerary we survive, reinforces our resiliency and shapes how we engage with our worlds and meaningfully curate our families. I am already looking forward to the next journey on which Erzinger chooses to invite us.

Tourist is publication by Sea Crow Press, released April 2023.

TAK Erzinger is an American/Swiss poet and artist with a Colombian background. Her poetry has been featured by journals at Indiana University, Cornell University, McMaster University, the University of Baltimore and more. Erzinger’s poetry collection “At the Foot of the Mountain,” (Floricanto Press 2021), won the University of Indianapolis, Etchings Press Whirling Prize for 2021 for best nature poetry book and was a finalist at The International Book Awards 2022. It was also a finalist at the Willow Run Book Awards and Eyelands Book Awards. Her poetry collection “Tourist” (Sea Crow Press 2023) was released in April. Erzinger has been awarded a spot by the Art Centre Padula, Artist in Residency Programme summer 2023.