Coachella Elegy

Californian landscapes in crisis and transitiveness as a state of being frame Christian Gullette’s Coachella Elegy. These chiseled, cartographic poems take us through Joshua Tree, Palm Springs, Santa Cruz, Mendocino, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, in intimate, foreboding portraits of self, state, family, and love. The poet, seeking terra firma, proves place to be a metaphor for mind:

We spent the night
looking at lights on mansions

in the Provo hills where
there were songs and warm babies.

A poetic ethnography of 21st century California, this book commemorates a brother, the divine, the earth, and lives lost to AIDS: “the neighborhood funeral home / where so many were brought // now shuttered and slated for condos.”

Three of the four sections begin with prose poems titled “In Transit,” orienting the reader within the speaker’s geospatial sensitivity: “We point to locations where we want / to fly to”; “I realize how [the Beltway] holds things up or keeps them / from falling”; and, “my bag is on board somewhere below us with mail whose final destination is not my destination.”

Gullette brings a crystalline, queer vantage point to a legendary corpus of Californian chronicles. The book’s tone is elegiac—grieving music, bee extinction, and, in “Portfolio,” the land of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, which has been replaced by a hotel chain, with its “[c]urated food and beverage / plus ‘community engagement’ / […] A new company’s take on Lifestyle.”

Apocalypse is at the center of Coachella Elegy—personal (a husband’s eye cancer), national (a confluence of fires, earthquakes, and water shortage “on the eves of war”), and global:

it’s a red world now,
feverish and fiery,

which is how the present feels.

This unsparing field guide (“I’ve never been able to say we’re doomed / though we’ve wiped out the bees—”, writes Gullette, and, “how easily it could all become smoke”) offers respite through stunning love poems, and the promise of return:

After dinner, we wander the hotel hedge maze,
nowhere to go this late but home.