Looking at the Shape of the Continent: Poetry and Place in Corinna Cook’s Leavetakings

Corinna Cook, Leavetakings. University of Alaska Press, 2020. 130 pp. $16.95.

I grew up in a Houston suburb about a mile from a bayou. When the bayou flooded, so did our street. The muddy waters brought in various slippery creatures. I remember counting froggy roadkill with my father, competing to find the most flattened skins (which were everywhere, like the greeny brown peels of some hideous fruit). Once, we found a turtle in our backyard, about the size of a melon. Every now and then, there was a news story about a confused dolphin who ended up in the bayou, washed in from the Gulf of Mexico. 

I haven’t thought about the bayou and its slimy jewels for years. I think of it now because I am thinking about place, and the lives within a place, thanks to Corinna Cook’s stunning debut collection of essays, Leavetakings. She writes about her native Alaska, exploring its environment, geography, and history. The collection brims with intellect and lyricism, as Cook writes about climate change, salmon fisheries, Native Alaskan funeral rites, bread-making, aging parents, complex friendships, and much more. Cook’s ferocious curiosity and poetic precision makes this collection a remarkable contribution to ecological nonfiction. 

Deftly shifting between micro and macro, Cook is equally comfortable detailing a fish’s guts as she is entire swathes of landscapes. Here, she describes slicing open a salmon: 

Razor cut after razor cut, the seduction was in the play between precision and ease of motion, in the  light resistance at the top of the cut that would then yield like butter. Packed tight between flaps of  splayed bellyskin lay the eggs, their mass of tangy, swollen globes as orange as embers. Scoping them  along the length of each fish, my fingers would comb past still-beating hearts, past pale-gray sacs of  stomach, past livers rich like chocolate. 

This photographic exploration brings to mind that greatest of fish observers, Elizabeth Bishop, in  her poem “The Fish.” And yet Cook can go sweeping, too. In the book’s opening essay, “Traverse,”  Cook is driving from Alaska down to Missouri, a good 4,000 miles. She writes, “It is this simple. I  am crossing the continent to look at the shape of it.” Later, she applies that poetic eye to highway road systems. She says, “If roads are like a fabric upon the land, its weave is all knotted up in  metropolitan areas. Where the mesh is loose, the land shows through.” Cook can do both bird’s eye  view and what I’ll call bird’s beak view, as she both soars above and nibbles the very worm. 

Leavetakings is split into four sections: “Inland,” “Intertidal,” “Upriver,” and “At Sea.” The  first and longest essay, “A Traverse,” introduces the reader to some of Cook’s main questions: What  is the relationship between land and industry? How do race and privilege shape who tells stories  about that land? How does memory incorporate yearning, both towards specific beloved individuals  and towards place? Furthermore, what are the feelings attached to each, when people exist so briefly,  and a place evolves over eons of time? 

These are big questions, thoughtfully unspooled throughout the course of the book.  Metaphor is one of Cook's primary tools in these explorations, as her images are balletic, full of agile  comparisons. For example, the impetus for “Fluid Places” is a photograph displayed in the Alaska  State Museum. The photographer is seated in a kayak that runs directly perpendicular to the  shoreline. Cook posits that the kayak creates a vertical y-axis in the image, while the shoreline cuts  horizontally across to make an x-axis. She uses this mathematical interpretation to argue, 

The x-y axis...recalls a literary theory. Were we to chart this essay...we’d chart narrative along the x axis, expressing actions and events as values of x. And we’d plot ideas vertically, expressing insights  as values of y. Therefore, if this museum photograph were a literary graph of events and ideas, we  might say that silhouetted shoreline happens, and that the kayak and contrail think. 

The reader must first understand the photo as an x-y axis and then as the relationship between events and thinking about events. Cook then turns the wonderful corkscrew of metaphor one more  time. She writes, “How easy, thinks the eye that has always loved algebra and the predictability of the  x-y axis. How easy, thinks the eye, overlooking the composition’s similarity to crosshairs.” This is yet  another interpretation of the original photograph. The speed at which Cook introduces images and  meaning teeters just on the right side of bewildering, as the essay feels like a gorgeous flipbook of  metaphors.

Cook’s next book project is ekphrastic essays, and one can see her talent for ekphrasis in this  collection, as evidenced by “Fluid Places,” which does so much with one photograph. I keep  thinking about Cook’s eye and the sharp poetry she applies to environmental and geographic  concerns. One image in the collection acts as a kind of ars poetica, explaining the threads of Cook’s  interests. In “A Traverse,” she describes visiting a mining site in an Alaskan village. She watches  construction workers nail wooden wings to heavy objects due to be airlifted by helicopter, one of  them an outhouse. She writes, “With its fresh plywood wings, the outhouse rose into the air straight  and true...Whoever made those wings even painted them with a few black curves to suggest wing  feathers.”  

Cook then states that in her early twenties, she changed professional directions. Rather than working in environmental policy, she began to pursue the arts. She writes,  

In the arts I sought a more roundabout inquiry...I began a search – one that continues – for a kind  of ethnography capable of mapping the odd mixture of humor and holiness and love and irony that  moves a person to paint wing feathers on plywood so that bound across the tundra, a shithouse will  fly straight. 

Cook’s focus on this almost surreal image, and her anthropological questions of who and how and  why, illustrate her overarching attitudes of portraiture, tenderness, and inquiry. I think, once more, about Cook’s origin story. I can’t imagine a childhood more different  than mine. When writing about Douglas Island, the part of Alaska where she grew up, Cook states,  “My mom taught me to glance around for bears when I got off the school bus with my clarinet.”  Later, she describes the annual ferry trip taken by her school’s pep band and cheerleading squad to a  regional sports tournament: “Cheerleaders and band kids would work on math together while  watching for orcas during ten- to thirty-hour sailings.” When Cook writes about “jigging for squid,”  I imagine people dancing to make money so that they can buy squid. This is not what this means. A  jig, apparently, is a type of fishing lure.

I wonder if I have any Houston arcana, any upper-middle-class-went-to-private-school  esoterica, that would stump Cook. What would it mean for me to write about my own place? Do I  have anything interesting to say? I think about the unbearable heat, the massive freeways, the  glittering skyline. Does that time I saw an armadillo cross the street in River Oaks (Houston’s richest  neighborhood) illustrate something grand about industrialization? Or was it simply a whimsical  moment? When writing about place, what is foregrounded, what is backgrounded, and how does  meaning emerge? 

When Cook moves from Alaska to Missouri, she feels stifled by Missouri’s moist summer  greenery. She writes, “Suspicious of air so thickened with heat and leaves, I keep watch through the  kitchen window. It would take a wise plumber to knock sense into this kind of green, to wrench and  tighten its pipes just so and contain the lush slop.” Used to Alaska’s cold crispness, Cook isn’t too  impressed by Missouri’s almost rude vibrancy. Like Cook, I also moved to Missouri from  somewhere else (in my case, Texas). Missouri’s lush slop was at least somewhat reminiscent of  Houston’s humid swampiness. The tornado sirens were strange, though, the saddest sound in the  world. That eerie wail was like the heartbeat of the Midwest to me. 

I am a poet, and I tend to write about the interior and the imagination. I’m grateful to Cook’s writing for showing me that these interests are not mutually exclusive with an eye that looks  outward. In a twist on Marianne Moore, Cook makes me think about my imaginary gardens with real  toads in them, or even my real gardens with imaginary toads in them. Cook brings me to consider  my own places, both inside and out. I wonder, in a new way, where I’m from.