Bright Specimen

How does one tend to the small and fragile when the world is burning? Julie Poole’s Bright Specimen follows the speaker’s weekly visits to the largest herbarium in the southwestern United States. While gazing at the affixed plant species, the speaker imagines them as captives (“I saw limbs—wrists, in fact, being held down”) and recalls a hospitalization episode in which she, too, was deemed a flight risk, and was held down in a four-point restraint. What happens when the human is made specimen? When one is rendered a case study, drained of their agency, consciousness, desire? In these elegant and delicate observations of plant and animal life, Poole illustrates the interconnectedness of seasons, family history, and traumatic processing alongside the “spiky nodes” of poppies and “bluish / dead” of lavender “still harboring / sunlight.” By detailing the intricate patterns of discs and petals and thorns, and the “sex-part[s]” and “weird hat[s]” of blossoms, Poole makes majesty out of the diminutive. The poet interprets the organisms that may or may not survive and the stormy, unforgiving elements that sway their fates: “the sky’s gone mad / what have we done / this time ? how / many people are dead? / each droplet a bleeding / man each gust / a woman found buried.” We, too, are a fragile species, pinned specimens for some future archive, uncertain if we might continue amid the conditions that we, too, produce.