for/ward innovation
for/ward innovation: luna rey hall’s elegy for [lukas]
elegy for [lukas]
luna rey hall
Querencia Press, 2025
$13
For whom is the elegy? The one who is dead or for those of us who remain to sing? Edward Hirsch acknowledges a duality in this ancient form, that it serves to house both “mortal loss and consolation.” It is through ritualized action—the transformation of grief into language—that makes it all the more bearable. I like this observation; elegy is not only performance, but space, one in which the meditative mind can retreat, as Samuel Coleridge once said. luna rey hall, through brilliant formal choices and decadent silence, crafts a chapbook that implicates the reader in an elegiac chorus. Through lyric, narrative, fragments, and the recurring use of the virgule, we receive experiences that oscillate between stunning and devastating, between fear and flying.
“[samaras],” the poem with which hall opens the chapbook, is a stellar example of intentional sequencing. Not only does this poem tenderly teach us how to engage with the poetics of this writer, we are grounded through the wonderfully natural yet surreal imagery: “fell asleep / under the silver / maple…tiny helicopter / landed in my lap / dreary.” I know most readers see poetry as a passive engagement, but the moment a writer mentions the name of a plant, I am running to my books to unearth its deeper mythologies. Maples are regarded for their transformative properties and heralding in the seasons; the samara an artifact of play. In these six delicate couplets, the speaker remarks on how their body impeded the path of the samara, paralleling the lived experience of trans individuals for whom the flesh can be an obstacle and the source of one’s solace.
The transformation of the body is a recurring motif in elegy for [lukas], especially in poems like “[dancing]” and “we are all [stardust].” I chose these particular pieces to discuss because hall is doing some miraculous work through their use of brackets in this collection. Traditional ideas about grammar posit brackets as a tool to be used when one is inserting clarifications or corrections. We also see these marks appear when an additional piece of information is being added to the original source. With this in mind, it would appear to me that hall is adhering to grammatical constraints in order to complicate identity—[the body] is capable of containing [silence], [nail polish], [clay], and [stardust]. In reference to the latter, hall challenges biology with personal mythology: “he was made… / a cosmic orchid / abloom / petals aflame /;” like stars, we are allowed to die, and are allowed to let another come to take our place.
There is much to admire about this collection: its exigency, its innovation, its unravelling of experience. The selection of childhood photos to dapple the cover is such a unique design choice as well. Whoever made that decision has my utmost kudos and admiration. Now that I have been exposed to the experimental works of luna rey hall, I cannot wait to tackle the rest of their oeuvre. Should you like to as well, they are the author of loudest when startled (YesYes Books, 2020) space neon neon space (Variant Lit, 2022), no matter the diagnosis (Game Over Books, 2023), and the patient routine (Brigids Gate Press, 2023). You can find more of their poetry in The Florida Review, The Rumpus, and Raleigh Review. Find more of their innovative work and activism at lunareyhall.com.
Published in Pictura Journal
