Lucien Darjeun Meadows. In the Hands of the River. Hub City Press, 2022. 
Reviewed by Anna Laura Reeve, Dec. 15, 2022.

Lucien Darjeun Meadows’ collection of dynamic and mercilessly incisive poems, In the Hands of the River, centers the love a child can have for deeply troubled parents. It’s a truism that “children are resilient,” but beneath this glib acknowledgment that children survive are stories of real kids navigating love for unraveling parents. Those stories, like the one woven by and among these poems, are uniquely gutting. Gestures and luminous images throughout the book reach deep into the liminal space of a child’s growing realization without psychoanalysis or rigidity. They are flexible and graceful, full of desire, starvation, and imagination. They edge warily around catharsis, centering instead images of the fleeting moment and the senses alive within it. In this tender, prismatic debut, the voice of a lost child searches the force and stasis of his love for his mother, father, sister, and lover, always—and this is why the child is still with us—allowing it to move through him, to take him where it will, like the living force it is. 

The young son of a Cherokee coal-miner and a mother lost in substance abuse disorder in rural West Virginia, the boy inhabiting these poems navigates parental abandonment, isolation, extreme poverty, and an emerging awareness of a queer identity in a place characterized by cultural whiplash. Where but rural Appalachia is the beauty of “unspoiled nature” marketed alongside the unchecked destruction of that landscape by strip-mining and mountaintop removal? Where else does moralistic old-time religion share such close quarters with the opioid epidemic and its crushing social impact? But Appalachia is not as exceptional as Americans like to think, and the strong young son moving through these poems reminded me of Shuggie, the son of an alcoholic mother in Douglas Stuart’s 2020 Booker winner Shuggie Bain, set in Thatcher-era Glasgow. Both characters, to me, exemplify childhood survival. Like Shuggie, Meadows’ speaker captures spare, precise images of neglect and self-harm, of a young child keeping anxious watch over a sleeping mother’s ragged breathing, of abandonment by a father and first forays into a queer adolescence. 
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Also like Shuggie, the boy’s love for his mother is compassionate and authentic. Their bare, neglected homes are familiar and—if dangerous—known and navigable. It’s so real you feel it in your own chest. A poignant moment glows in “Ruby is Her Birthstone,” when the speaker arrives home in the evening to find his mother passing out near a ruby bracelet and a notepad “with your maiden name / Written over and over” as he remembers her younger self “singing Evita / Through our house” (18) and driving her children an hour to Morgantown to see the show. Evita, the musical about the luckiest rise and most tragic fall of the beautiful, vibrant woman whose desire was endless—whose supercharged ambition couldn’t overcome forces of class and caste—who succumbed to addiction and its physical toll. The speaker’s loving and acute gaze envelops his passed-out mother:
    I watch you still, your mouth open.
         I unclasp the bracelet, put it around
    Your wrist. Breathing loud, your body
         A brown honeysuckle left empty
    In the sun after a boy pulls the sword
         Of long tongue from throat. (19)

Many of my favorite poems from the book engage with Appalachian identities, industries, and places with the sensitive and assured rendering that create a sense of home. I’m excited to read anti-pastoralism and eco-poetics coming from the mountains, and Meadows turns Appalachian exoticism on its head, assigning rural mountain-dwellers every complexity that, it turns out, is the birthright of humanity—even Appalachia. But this is just another of the great collections coming out of Appalachia, these days, for which region is a setting rather than a character or flattened backdrop. In “Because We Want Horses,” a Cherokee father and young son work with neighbors to set fenceposts in concrete, enlivening what could be a classic pastoral scene with a child’s focused interiority. Trim, clean couplets isolate moments of simple sensory pleasure—“As I slip my hands along wire coiled / And waiting, imagine the arc of light”—then drift seamlessly to a future of sensory deprivation, of “Years later in a cold room after I forget / How to smile, eat, speak,” and then tumble back into the luminous present of childhood:
    I drop the wire. I run to the hole
         My father walks toward, and I jump in,

    These arms pressed rigid to my sides, straight
         As a post. How I hoped for concrete.

    He smells like pennies as he lifts me out,
         Swats me with a smile, says Atsutsa, go play. (13)

It’s peculiar, and liberating, to read work born of such tragic neglect and suffering that’s framed in such a simple, active way. These poems are written by a runner, and I knew this before going online to learn more about Meadows: this child survives his childhood not just by the cultivation of intense inner control (self-harm and disordered eating), but by the outward physical act of running, as in “Seventeen”: 
     Entering the forest is like pushing 
Off into sleep—my feet silent on moss, 
     The cool air I dream a mother’s embrace. (28)
Again and again, the young person inhabiting these poems runs, runs, runs, embodying both an escape from danger and a swirling stasis. A scene of being trapped overnight in a well is repeated in different poems, its horror amplified by the loneliness the boy endures. But if entrapment is a powerful theme here, the image of a river—lifted up in the book’s title—is an equal companion. The final poems, touching on trust-building with a lover, and an acceptance of a father’s absence, open the energy of the collection’s deep love to outflow: the child who survived is running, pushing a cyclic current forward, telling a story of the freedom that love can create.