The associative leaps in Beeder’s poems often rely on conduits in sensory experience: sight (and memory) and, most often, sound.If I were to interview Beeder about her writing process, I would ask her if she allows narrative or sonics to carry her through the poem. My guess would be that the music and cadence of words offers her entrance into each subsequent image. Just look at how the language propels “After Aristophanes: O Bird of fellow feather come”:

and “Tetanus”:

Whether or not Beeder sets out with the notion that a poem will be full of assonance and another based on trochaic hexameter, we cannot know, but the propulsive syntax, the lush and varied language, vows the subject’s immediacy to the reader.

Like gods and lovers, a reader responds best to dotage. “I liked the poem about your mother dying” allows the reader’s voice into the poem: “You should write more poems about depression” (p. 17) Although Beeder both resists what the proto-reader has said to her, she also obsesses and reckons with “what a reader wants in an imagined eclogue:

Have some of us had these same thoughts about Beeder’s work? Have we resisted the catalogs, desired for more personal poems about loss and depression? This is not Beeder’s verse, however. If we are looking for confessional, straightforward narrative: look to another title. That’s not to say that Beeder muddles meaning with sonics. If we are not careful readers we can get caught in the current of the syntax, read the words for their sounds, but we must slow ourselves, pay more attention. The what is happening in the poems is always amongst the how.

In one of my favorite poems in the collection, “The Charges Are Stalking & Arson,” the firestarter, the maker, begins very much in the tangible or, at the very least, the audible:

But then the poem shifts. “Don’t shush me,” the speaker says, as if someone else lingers just offstage, then he adds, “Powder speaks: dirt is mute.” From there, the poem burns through its wick toward the explosive material:

Not only is the image startling — the bale speaking its love to flame — but the delivery of the image, sustained ever so slightly longer with “dry & quiet,” allows us to pause on the scene as the final action consumes itself.

Again and again, throughout Now Make an Altar, the reader feels an insistence to plummet into the next poem — each voice and each setting, a new valley rivered with significance — and there, pausing for a moment at the edge of the poem, before we take another step out onto air, we are asked to make an altar to our own presence, to dress it with effigy: fruit, flowers, photographs, letters, a ritual burning, an imperative: Follow me down. I have cleared the way for you.