A Review of Making a Kingdom of It by Lance Larsen

Aren’t we all, always, already making a kingdom of it? Of our petty pities and miseries? Our passing joys and amateur triumphs? Just so, Lance Larsen pierces the veil of our mortality to discover the human and divine lurking in the everyday. Whether you are new to Larsen’s work or a longtime reader, his sixth and most recent poetry collection, Making a Kingdom of It, is sure to bewitch and bless as it meanders through the backyards and countrysides of existential dreaming.

The first poem alone deserves its own review. From title to first line, we’re already juxtaposed, since “Having My Back Erased” is, clearly, “A miracle.” In this four-stanza, twenty-line miracle, the speaker is a third grader in the passenger seat on their way back from the ER—new stitches “throbbing … under my puffed eye.” The speaker’s mother is “driving and drawing pictures / on my back with her finger”: “Now a windmill, now a giraffe.” Lists of objects are not just technique in Larsen’s poetry, but an attempt to grapple with the seeming infinity of things, ideas, and possibilities in modern life.

As the lines proceed, we lift from concrete images to abstract meaning: “Even wrong guesses were a revelation in texture / and touch, not a comb but a rake, not a swing set / but an octopus.” Here, the similarity of two drawings becomes a metaphor for semantic language—the limits, ambiguity, and therefore power of the sign. Listen to Larsen on the feeling of erasure, that moment between each new picture when the mother’s hand erases the speaker’s back: “I was pure / palimpsest, ions and vectors, a swirling energy / I hadn’t yet grown into.” “How she turned / me into nothing,” mimics the vanity and ultimacy of subjective experience.

By the poem’s end:

I cover this poem at length because it illustrates many of the themes, strategies, and beauties of the whole collection. For starters, we are grounded in place and time, in a car driving away from the ER, with a clear cast of characters and a boundedness to the experience that is at once highly specific and yet utterly universal. Then, notice how a sad experience (getting stitches) becomes a happy one in memory, part nostalgia part mystery. As artworks of language, poems transcend their raw materials to ruminate on communication’s metaphysics. For me, this poem is partially about the failure of words, a meta-metaphor about discernment, reading, images, and imagination—how they work. Could there be a better allegory for poetry than trying to guess what someone’s finger is drawing on your back? Larsen collapses the boundary between picture and signifier. All meaning is unstable, and for that reason, absolutely magical when it occurs. As Larsen poignantly puts it, “aren’t we all odes / in search of other odes?”

Lance Larsen helps us to stare “into the burning / church of our own bodies.”

With the beginning behind us, let’s jump to the center of the book. If inexperienced manuscripts “sag in the middle” as the writing truism goes, then Larsen shows off his craftsmanship—two of my favorite pieces were the first and last poems of the second section. Larsen fuses nature and biblical imagery in “I caught an Elk Chewing” this way: “hello mystery, / hello hallelujah and kingdom come.” Again, Larsen’s language is about language, for “I will speak nothing but elk all day … elk on the brain, elk in my devotions.” “Watch,” Larsen invites, this masterpiece of description:

her jaws working, her fierce high plains
face tilted in first light, eyes wet,
big elk mouth powdered with pollen.

A relatable moment of locking eyes with wildlife becomes, in Larsen’s capable hands, an exercise in seeing and being seen. Which is to say, an exercise in vision, in visitation, perhaps even theophany. Frozen in time, this still-life of an elk sighting on the hiking trail becomes a kind of intimacy, a being-known that humans crave but that all animals already share.

If stitches are too fleshy and elk at dawn too transcendent, fear not—for Larsen’s a humorist too. How about this poem, “More Garter Snakes in My Theology,” which begins, “What a lousy citizen of the republic I am,” and continues:

My idea of politics equals reading
Blake while sipping a mango smoothie.
On licentious days, I read him
in my underwear. I need more voodoo
in my mortgage payments, more garter
snakes in my theology—time to nap
naked on a hot apocalyptic rock.

Hilarious, humdrum, but also hopeful. What, if anything, can unite a diverse and divided republic? The itchy shadow of mortgage payments, the yearning for indulgent pleasure, some honesty amid all this posturing. I’m a fan of Larsen’s polity, and of the way he mixes sacred and profane as easy as piña coladas or margaritas.

It’s hard to do justice to the aesthetic unity of Larsen’s collection even as it wanders through grief, childhood, and cheeky jests. Readers can expect to learn “Pantheism for Beginners” as well as mourn miscarriages, chronic illness, and widows. Braiding biblical phraseology with suburban and rural scenery never seems to get old for Larsen, as in “After Reading Ecclesiastes, I walk the Foothills in Search of Owls” or “After Reading Song of Songs, I take Out the Garbage.” The latter of those two makes the love poem new again:

My beloved is in a far country, which is to say
up thirteen carpeted stairs then hang
a quick left. I’m carrying into the cold
a bulging trash bag, big enough to hold
and hold and stretch and hold, like love itself …

Later, the narrator at the garbage can imagines his beloved thus: “with the Big Dipper / she spoons steaming water over her nakedness.” Notice also the technique in the title: a prepositional phrase establishes the style, and a declaration sets the occasion.

Throughout, Larsen’s favorite tropes include swimming laps at rec pools (always an exercise in immanent grace), twilight creatures (like porcupines), and a veritable tour of half of Europe (from Amsterdam to Florence). In fact, Making a Kingdom of It is a tour de force—poems in the collection received seven significant awards and appeared in dozens the world’s finest venues, from London Magazine to Poetry. It could not recommend itself more highly.

I conclude with one last teaser. The book’s longest poem, which opens the third and final section, is an homage to Adam Zagajewski titled, “This is Not the Hour of Poetry.” In it, the late Zagajewski delivers an English reading series at noon to a small university. What happens in this poem can’t be summarized, but there’s a reason it won England’s 2022 Alpine International Poetry Contest. How it gets from sleepy students who could be “stapling small thing A / to large thing B” all the way to “shouldering / the sadness of East Europe” is truly remarkable. In that poem and all the rest of them, Lance Larsen helps us to stare “into the burning / church of our own bodies.”