Texas Review Press, 2025, 73 pp.
In the Garden of Eden, Eve ate of the forbidden fruit and cursed humankind with its terrible knowledge. Kimberly Ann Priest’s tether & lung plays upon this age-old story of good and evil, cracking open the dichotomy like an egg to reveal the messiness within.
This collection of poems explores the fracture of a marriage after a secret is revealed—a husband’s closeted homosexuality, at odds with his religious upbringing and the life he has built. Set against the pastoral backdrop of stables and gardens, canning jars and roving horses, tether & lung traverses the landscape of loss and longing with striking vulnerability. Indeed, “striking” is an apt description, as tether & lung is a double-edged sword. Marriage is the site of domestic peace and violence; the physical body hosts both shame and freedom.
In “Gomorrah,” the speaker cuts flowers over the kitchen sink as she grieves her husband’s emotional and physical absences. Priest’s language embodies both sensuality and pain, guilt and blame:
My murderous hands caressing each stem and leaf
as I repent to myself I’m so sorry, I had to chop you off.
There was no proof of anything. No incrimination. No criminal.
Only indifference to my supple back and breasts.
Only the flowers you brought home as expected. Only that
sometimes you were not at work when I called
though you told me you would be.
The poem’s title evokes biblical judgment, a trespass against God. “Gomorrah” employs the heavy-handed language of Christian theology, yet the exact locus of such judgment is messy, ambiguous. The betrayed wife is herself repentant, with her “murderous hands caressing” the flower stems. Her anger spills out against the dead flowers, but there was “no proof of anything.” All that remains is indifference and a palpable loneliness.
In the collection’s notes section, Priest explains that although the story of Gomorrah is often erroneously cited as an example of God’s displeasure with homosexuality, the focus of the ancient text was on the city’s violence and material indulgences. Sexuality is not the focus, yet we cannot ignore the influence of religion and its interpreters.
“The Good Wife” continues this biblical imagery to illuminate how both husband and wife have been marked by religion’s teachings on gender roles. This poem conjures the pervasive sense of othering that wafts throughout the collection: the trapped-animal feeling of secret desires, and the implicit violence wrought by their repression.
I find the place where you are locked under a rib
partly pried loose,
as if every part of you
is for opening.
You are landscape beneath:
spleen labeled fortunate, arteries depending, intestines inscribed
borrowed from my father’s first lies
The body itself is the terrain upon which our secrets and stories are written and eventually unveiled. There is a sense of coming apart from the revealing, of carefully crafted stitches coming undone. Priest uses the rib of Adam to suggest that both man and woman are scarred by the secrets they’ve had to carry and by the roles they’ve had to mold themselves into. The physical bodies in tether & lung contain so much conflict—needs, scars, longing, trauma, whole histories.
Priest continues the bodies-as-landscapes motif in “Into Another Country,” playing again upon biblical dichotomies of innocence and knowledge, beast and human. This poem emphasizes how our physicality connects us to the natural world and extends this exploration into the country of motherhood. Here, Priest juxtaposes the public act of giving birth in a hospital with the private act of birthing. In the hospital room, “some worry, wring their hands and pray. / Others gawk, entertained.” There’s an unnatural, all-too-public atmosphere surrounding the nurses and onlookers. The husband is in attendance too, but barely relevant:
mother-with-child is a lone animal clawing, coddling,
carving home out of a wilderness complete
with thighbone cups and dried leaf plates, snakeskin blankets,
rainwater drink, jack rabbit and aphid feast.
There is a longing edge to this image of the primitive, Edenic wilderness of childbirth, as well as a callback to biblical language:
She and I were always one flesh and that’s why, now
suddenly, as the rifting comes, and the wire jaws of Hell breech,
barbed and surging, our bodies rip from one another
and she breaks out into another country
Like so much of tether & lung, the act of creation necessitates a certain violence: a ripping and rending apart only to perhaps come back together again, like the cycles of the moon or the tides. These natural rhythms, the push and pull of sharpness and softness, is at the core of the collection. Priest borrows the language of the Bible but expands it to create her own personal mythology of beginnings and endings.
Ultimately, tether & lung is about dualities—husband and wife, mother and child, desire and shame, constraint and freedom. How do we make sense of a world of pleasure and pain, where “everything in creation is soft and violent”? Priest leaves this unanswered. Questions hang in the air like mist upon a garden. This is the collection’s strength: to probe thorny issues of belief and secrets and pain without being consumed by them, to grant them their birthright of cracked-open beauty.
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Brittany Micka-Foos is the author of the short story collection It’s No Fun Anymore (Apprentice House Press, 2025) and the chapbook a litany of words as fragile as window glass (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Her poetry and short stories have been published in Ninth Letter, Witness Magazine, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Bellingham, WA.
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