Heating the Outdoors

Many of Marie-Andrée Gill’s poems in this compact collection offer lovesick moments and sardonic self-awareness. A lost lover is the ghostly protagonist in miniature scenes, each drawn in a section of two-to-ten lines and placed on its own page. In “Solfège of Storms,” the first-person speaker speculates:

I imagine you’ll hear me
if I think loud enough
and you’ll appear on my threshold

still on the goddamn threshold
there but with a coat on your back

there but not there

Heating the Outdoors is a study in tone, beautifully captured in Kristen Renee Miller’s translations from the French. Of fresh raw heartbreak, Gill writes: “All those Céline tunes / I sing in my car / quench my sugar rages / for you.” A tart realism holds emotion in check, as when the speaker observes, “Each detail of your ordinary beauty hurts me. // I make up stories at every turn in the road […] How the hell to quit running after you?” As the book title suggests, overcoming heartbreak can feel Sisyphean.

In the final poem, “The Future Shrugs,” the vernacular voice gives way to an unguarded lyricism that vibrates with a precision belying the title’s diffidence: “Under the snow-drunk sun I replace you, in each new trail / I open and enter like a woman in heat, in the sharp, bright / paths of snowflakes, being born.” Such heightened language imbues this section with a newfound strength: “I let the territory scatter me like migratory birds that don’t know how to lose their way.” While an equilibrium was elusive in the earlier poems, by the end, a magnetic north orients the words.