A Review of To Wildness by Julia Thacker

Review by Carla Sarett

Julia Thacker, To Wildness. Waywiser Press, 2025. 88 pages. Winner, Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize.

Reviewed by Carla Sarett

In her self-assured debut collection To Wildness, Julia Thacker vividly brings to life the family and fast-vanishing Appalachian culture that formed her. I find no better way to introduce Thacker’s expansive vision than through her opening poem “Artisanal Moonshine”—where the snows of Massachusetts are “Biblical.”

          I alone refused to be baptized.
          My cousins thought I was going to hell 
          but I only moved to Massachusetts 
          where snows are Biblical 
          and thinking is the local prayer.

          I live with a man who can't sleep.
          He reads the French Surrealists 
          aloud until sunrise, his voice 
          a field stubbled with hoarfrost.

          Frost: a silver word, 
          pewter of Pilgrims. Thirty years 
          of evenings in the Plough and Stars 
          call for another round of spirits, fig-infused.

Thacker has written fiction, and it shows; she is an expert storyteller. In a few lines, she deftly moves from a refused baptism to French Surrealists (who will appear again in the collection) to the “pewter of Pilgrims.” She tells us about her early roots—a family who believes you’re damned because you “alone” skipped baptism. We feel the enormous distance that Thacker has traveled to the heady soil of New England (where “thinking is the local prayer”). It’s not an easy or a straightforward road. The poem ends by circling back to the poet’s mother, and older superstitions (“fear of water”) that she carries with her. She admits that she is “all mixed up / like that.”

Throughout To Wildness, Thacker’s talent for narrative detail is evident. Characters are not archetypes. They’re flesh-and-blood people. They act in real ways. They’re hard to forget. Take these sharp lines from “God Awful,” where we encounter Aunt Roxie sloppily drinking in bed:

          Aunt Roxie sleeps fenced
          by a metal railing. She bums smokes, 
          sips whiskey from teacups, sloshes 
          spirits onto her nightgown.

What a lively picture Thacker paints. Or, later in the poem, this tragicomic portrait of her family “falling out of bed and bathtubs.”

          My kin are falling out of beds and bathtubs 
          as from a great height.
          For the family reunion, they dine at Applebee's, 
          tethered to oxygen tanks. Study
          Technicolor menus like the Great Books.

Different losses suffuse the collection as the poet tries to grasp where she’s been. It’s a double loss, both of cultural identity and an American way of life. Maybe this hard way of life wasn’t meant to last; Thacker’s hardly nostalgic or sentimental. But loss is loss, it always hurts. In one poem (about a mental hospital) she asks: “But what am I in the world.” Things around the poet seem to be de-materializing: “We don't speak about the country of the old, / strolling unnoticed, dissolving / into sidewalks and salted air,” An old fishing village is “gentrified” in “Archeology” —“I no longer recognize myself. / The way cod wrapped in brown / paper forgets the sea.”. In “Little Black Dress,” “moths have made a feast” of a dress that once slept on the beach.

We get, up close, the sense of eerily emptied Midwestern downtowns. In “A Guide for Caregivers,” the author’s father is “not in Belgium,” but it’s “as though there has been a great war.”

          Do not say, Dad, we are not in Belgium.
          We're in Dayton, Ohio
          on the Midwestern plain of industrial farms 
          where cattle are pumped full of drugs, 
          corralled, fattened, felled and shipped 
          by rail. We are in the great Midwest 
          and the downtowns are empty 
          as though there has been a great war.

“She calls her second husband Unfortunate Mistake and the third Bigger Mistake” offers this unadorned view of a mother, “on the run from this husband or that”—

          Teeth gone bad because babies 
          leech calcium. Dimples and dentures.
          On the run from this husband or that, 
          she checks us into The Starlite Motel.

It feels like moral imperative for Thacker to depict what she (and perhaps, in her view, America itself) has left behind or, more to the point, tossed aside. In the aptly titled “Black Hole,” a brother arrives late to his mother’s funeral, and then “steps out during the eulogy to toke up.” Sadly, we seem to know that man and his future already. Thacker then introduces his “four sons from three drive-by mothers”— the matter-of-fact language similar to “this husband or that.” She shows how the boys are drawn into the father’s games:

          My brother plays bass in a band called Ebola.
          A pit bull guards his days and nights, guards 
          his four sons from three drive-by mothers.
          I've watched his boys rake a stash 
          delicately, pick out stems and seeds.
          When the union schedules a drug test, 
          the youngest pees into a plastic cup 
          and ratholes it in my brother's jacket.

The stanza’s final lines conclude: “What I know about these children / I could bellow into a field.” There’s a sense of defeat here—America isn’t thinking about these kids, they’ve been tossed aside. The brother’s world has its own rules, and all the poet can do is scream.

Some of my personal favorites in the collection involve libraries, which were lifesavers in Thacker’s childhood. In Missouri Review, she wrote of the value of bookmobiles (“sanctum of wonders”) in her “chaotic” childhood of housing projects. “For An Abandoned Library in Detroit” ends with a story about her Uncle John watching the death of a young welder “into the ladle of hot steel.” The Uncle, who has worked “thirty years on an assembly line,” works his regular shift and then walks into the library:

          and afterward walked to the library 
          and stared into a book
          as though it were a tablet of water.

There’s an almost King James Bible cadence as the Uncle stares into a book “as though it were a tablet of water,” The Uncle has returned to the library because it’s offered him life (now denied to the young welder). In “In the Library at the End of the World,” Thacker shows the magical power of libraries and books (as well as her own debt to magical realism). What lover of Russian novels doesn’t feel that it must be “snowing in St. Petersburg”?

          Knowledge is over.
          Through hail storms and smashing 
          glass, I sleep too much.
          Words drown, smudge and swell. 
          I fish a bulbous novel from the waters 
          and Anna Karenina flings herself.
          It is snowing in St. Petersburg.

Thacker plays with several forms (including prose poems) in this collection with equal facility. She displays a special gift for the cento (or collage poem.) In “Lovesick Cento,” she uses lines from a variety of French surrealists to deepen her own themes. (Thacker is using translations by Robert Bly and Louis Simpson.) Like the best cento writers, she mines other poets to fit her own voice— and the resulting cento sounds like no one else.

          Let's set fire to the city, so the carousel mermaids burn, 
          the color of their cheeks become still brighter.
          Flames parading in a proud pavane
          among roses. The concierge will be looking the other way, 
          reminded of an entire forest of evergreens in a keyhole.

Invoking the French surrealists circles back to Thacker’s opening poem: the whimsy of surrealism now exploding the constraints of working-class life. It’s not too great a leap to imagine this poet “setting fire” to her past—America is, after all, a country of reinvention. So many of us set those fires, only to search for our identity in the ash. With To Wildness Julia Thacker celebrates the flames and the ash.

Carla Sarett is a contributing editor at New Verse Review. She writes poetry, fiction and, occasionally, essays. She has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best American Essays, Best Microfictions, and Best of the Net. She has published one full-length collection, She Has Visions (Main Street Rag, 2022) and two chapbooks, including My Family Was Like a Russian Novel (Plan B, 2023). Carla has a PhD from University of Pennsylvania and is based in San Francisco.

---

If you’d like to read sample poems from Thacker’s collection, here are links to a few in their original publication venues and forms:

“Notes Toward an Elegy” in At Length

“For an Abandoned Library in Detroit” in The Missouri Review