Speaking Into a World that We Will Eventually Not Inhabit: On Christian Wessels’ Who Follow the Gleam
Christian Wessels, Who Follow the Gleam, University of Massachusetts Press, April 2026, 108 Pages
The potent moments in Christian Wessels’ debut book of poems Who Follow the Gleam, to me, are the ones that feel like the speaker has morphed into a future, past, or radically other form of himself right before our eyes. “Sympathetic Magic from the Black Forest,” the first poem in the collection, stakes its claim on disorienting rearrangements of repeated units:
Because every green cloud has a season,
every untouched pool, a spell
for the untouched season, because every
Season has a green spell, untouched
by daylight
This passage adopts elements of chiasmus to heighten the sense of a priori logic to the opening spell. The statement about the green cloud is presented as the pre-supposition for a resulting statement. Such a statement is delayed indefinitely. Rather than fulfilling the premise of the because-statement, Wessels generates the feeling of rhetorical order through chiasmus, which also allows me to sit with limitless extension rather than itching for resolution. As the poem’s title suggests, the logical feeling that stems from the chiasmic reversal of the sentences is a little mesmerizing. It asserts its own power by invoking a memorable structure.
Sympathetic magic is magic that’s performed on a proxy object like a voodoo doll. Throughout Who Follow the Gleam, the speaker undergoes many proxy-fications. In “Sympathetic Magic,” the speaker perceives his own spirit outside of himself after having difficulty breathing in the forest. The doubling is disturbing, but it also points to the heightened stakes of language as a site that proves our interrelation. Later:
When I bruise my arm, apologies,
your arm is bruised.
This voice is an imitation of me, body and voice
When I speak your mouth moves
It may be our mouths that move in response to the speaker’s words as we read. It may be the speaker’s uncanny double, risen out of the ramblings of an oak. It may also be one of the many addressees who populate the speaker’s world. The poem’s transmission from the page to our bodies may not be that different from language’s traversal from the world of the dead back to us. Death is a surface or screen across which projections and doublings occur, and the thickness at the center of the chiasmic structure feels like an apt representation of that screen as well.
The death screen/mirror reflects the speaker’s sense that he is speaking into a world that he will eventually not inhabit, even as he channels and communicates with poets who have passed from this realm. A ghostly way of inhabiting the present might be one way to characterize the paradox of writing. Wessels’ way in Who Follow the Gleam is attentive to potential for revivification in the remnants of the past that we encounter in this life. In “Our Snail,” he translates a family member’s retelling of a long bedtime story about an anthropomorphic snail that her father improvised and reiterates the tension at the heart of storytelling itself. “We needed our snail to make it to Leipzig” the speaker remembers, but as the story goes on, she discovers that the fairy tale could not satisfy her desire and be accurate:
‘The snail never left
and neither did the people, that’s how
our town began, with that crowd . . .’ By that
point in the story we knew he had lied,
or at least imagined that parts of our shared life
were not true. . .’
And as the poem concludes, the speaker remembers her father:
‘we listened to our father
improvise. He sang in the church choir.
He never spoke about refining gold.’
The work of refining gold (which by now sounds a little magical on its own) is a version of the story that the father did not see as a story, in the same sense that poets might overlook the here and now in search of a poem or story that could satisfy an elevated, yet inchoate, desire. Though there are often voices from the annals of history here, the poems manage to find enchantment in the contemporary domestic reality of delivery errors, potty-training, and yardwork. “These modern notes/ and tones were stolen/ eons ago,” Wessels notes, and it is clear as he ferries language from various points in time, the tones come from somewhere beyond the chronological demarcations that separate our sense of the modern from the classical. The feeling of enchantment is not delimited by history or our unfamiliarity, and that is a remarkable achievement across Who Follow the Gleam.
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Tobi Kassim’s writing has been published in The Volta, Chicago Review, The Rumpus, The Kenyon Review, Best New Poets, Chicago Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by Undocupoets, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and Cave Canem. His chapbook Dear Sly Stone was published by Spiral Editions.