Hart Lang
“It’s hard to write a book about grief,” says Alison Thumel. Yet she found a way to do that in her new volume, Architect, winner of the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and just out from University of Arkansas Press.
Influenced by her brother’s death in a car accident, Thumel began writing the poems that would become Architect while working on her master of fine arts degree from UW-Madison. She felt a connection between Midwestern landscapes and grief.
“Then COVID hit,” she remembers, and with all the new time spent indoors she began thinking more about “the inside of houses.” That’s when Thumel, originally from Oak Park, Illinois, began making an overt connection to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. She calls her book “an extended elegy” around his architecture.
In a poem about auditing an architecture class, she writes: I came to the class believing that if I could not write about my brother, perhaps I could build something that would carry weight. I may have been searching for a new metaphor, to get away from night-dark fields and twisted metal.
The poems in Architect are “visually constructed,” says Thumel. While some are lyrical prose poems, others adopt formal structures like the sestina or the sonnet, or have other structural requirements — Thumel notes that traditional forms as well as visual poems, erasure poems and found poems underline her overall point, which is that “writing is built.”
“There’s no one correct way to grieve,” says Thumel, but she does perceive a progression through the poems in the book. Part one is “more about traditional grief and coping,” part two about “how the living are impacted by grieving” and part three encompasses “memorializing someone,” turning to myth, and the impulse to remember only the good things.
I don’t want to write this as an elegy, she writes, because it comes out too beautiful. “Grieving someone is complicated,” she says. “Memorializing someone is complicated.”
Thumel will read from Architect as part of “An Evening of Poetry” at A Room of One’s Own bookstore on April 25 at 6 p.m.
