“There isn’t an instruction manual for anything worthwhile.”
And that includes poetry.
Happily, Alison Malee’s literary output is glowingly accessible — and certainly worthwhile.
The quote above is from her 2024 collection of poems, It Is All Equally Fragile; that’s the fourth book by this local author — a 2012 Loyalsock High School graduate who recently moved back to Lycoming County after several years in New York City.
Preceded by Shifting Bone (2016), The Day Is Ready for You (2018) and This Is the Journey (2019), her latest volume offers brief, beautiful poems which — like so many of the best — are simply one of a kind.
Among many other merits, Malee has a way with evocative titles: “Ode to the Expendable,” “What Good Would It Do To Give Up Now?”, “What Is Another Word for Rain?” and “Any Learned Fear Can Be Unlearned.”
So you see what I mean by accessible. Many of the poems comprise nothing more than a disarmingly simple list: “Definitions,” “Occurrences,” “A Series of Requests,” “What Is Keeping Me Alive” and “Questions My Daughter Asks.”
It reminds me of a college friend who remarked, upon discovering Whitman’s poems: “These are really just lists; but what lists!”
Indeed, Equally Fragile addresses a vast range of human experience: seasons, friendship, faith, femininity, nature, marriage & kids, loss & grief, writing & poems, phones & social media, book groups, sexuality — even a car crash.
Yet for me, the poems’ great strength is their ability to offer wisdom and advice without sounding trite, superficial or pedantic.
While older poets do that a lot, modern writers tend to avoid it quite strictly. (As Archibald MacLeish once wrote: “A poem should not mean, / But be.”)
Yet there is something about Malee’s voice that’s so honest, so transparent, so authentic — she not only gets away with it, but also, at the same time, leaves you feeling better about your life and your world.
Here are some samples:
“Growing up is hard on the imagination.”
“We are all choosing to live — choosing to live! — / and praying it will be a choice that is honored.”
“I may wander back / to an old self one day, and / discover it is not me anymore.”
“We have nowhere to store our loneliness, / and so the world becomes a lover.”
“Being afraid / is a house in which / we have shattered / all of the windows.”
“Today is held together / by the same worry as yesterday.”
“The universe / says grace, and amen, / for its own offerings.”
I trust you can also see that despite the apparent simplicity, there’s a deep well of reflection, feeling and experience beneath the beguilingly unadorned phraseology. I read the book twice, and both times I found myself going back to re-read every individual poem a second or third time.
And as with the best poetry, I would always find the additional readings well rewarded with a richer, deeper feeling for the work.
While many poets struggle to get published these days — or else they go the self-publishing route — Malee has been picked up by legit houses, including Andrews-McMeel; she is currently working on a fifth volume, due in 2026.
And since her work is so very personal, I don’t mind ending with a personal note of my own:
For me, it’s a special pleasure to promote Malee’s work, as I was privileged to have her in the English classes I taught at Loyalsock High School many years ago. She and I also acted together in an LTHS production of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, where I played father to her feisty, fight-prone female.
I’ll never forget how hard I worked persuading her to push me down on the floor in one early scene; she felt it was disrespectful, but I insisted it fit her character and would play well with the audience.
I guess you could say that even after all these years, she’s still knocking me over.
And it plays well.
