The Worm Sonnets. Amelia Gorman. (Quarter Press, 2023), 12pp, chapbook, $8. www.quarterpress.com.

Review by Sandra J. Lindow

Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 6” concludes:

Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,
Leaving thee living in posterity?
Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair
To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir.

Amelia Gorman’s award-winning limited-edition chapbook, The Worm Sonnets, consists of ten meticulously crafted poems. Corresponding illustrations of plants and nematodes were originally published in naturalist studies from 1834 and 1897. Told through the perspective of a woman’s ghost, these poems describe a world where humans have disappeared and worms have regained predominance. “A Window to an Earlier World I” begins:

Before the world was worms and nothing else—
before we were matrices and one girl

As in “Sonnet 6” above, the book presupposes a world where worms are “heir.” It begins with a startling quote from Nathan Cobb’s, Nematodes and their Relationships, 1914, where Cobb suggests that if everything in the universe “were swept away” except for nematodes, “our world would still be dimly recognizable” because nematodes alone could provide a matrix of sufficient knowledge to know the location of “mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans” … “for every massing of human beings, there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes.”

Like Gorman’s previous book, Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota, 2021, The Worm Sonnets is a delicate blend of science and horror, life and death emerging from and dependent on each other, their intersection described in graphic detail. The initial poem, “Ghost Woman in Worm World” explores Cobb’s “dimly recognizable” nematode world. The sonnet’s midpoint volta begins: “With no one left to remember, worms touch worms/ to remember for us,” describing spectral shapes of trees and dogs, “a fat old cow” and “rotting logs.” But lest the reader get too comfortable with the pastoral, the sonnet concludes with these lines:

…Her ghost eyes which are now
just worms focus til a specific face
crawls by, she loved and knew before this place.

Throughout there is both acceptance of and resistance to the circle of life and death. In her avocation as animal shelter volunteer, Gorman has learned much about puppies and the worms that can infest them. “A Window to an Earlier World II” begins:

Before the world was nothing else but worms,
I had a little yard. I had a dog
who came to me off the street full of germs
and snarls, striding through blooming fog.

As the poem progresses, the intimacy between persona and dog creates a blurring of boundaries reflected in this end couplet:

Despite that, I’ll still bare my teeth and bite
at the oncoming tide of worms and white.

Throughout these poems, human relationship merges with the nematodal, the political, and the environmental.  Divorce becomes “a mushroom cloud. No/one’s an atoll” while sex is described as both a breaking and a joining:

…I’m in him and we both:

Are a flock of birds, breaking hollow bones
Are planets caught in each other’s orbit

The final poem “Ghost Worm in a Human World” is a reverse perspective of the first: told via the ghost of a worm rather than the ghost of a girl.

The rhythms of these poems are smooth and conversational. By infusing the abab, cdcd, efef, gg rhyme pattern with enjambment and interior rhyme, sonnets maintain density and subtlety without slipping into the singsong. Gorman’s end-rhyme couplets are particularly deft in their construction, often packing an emotional wallop. “Sex in a Worm World” ends:

We moan that what god has put together
we put together, tear asunder, and again
together.

My copy also includes a high-quality card stock pull out of Gorman’s poem “a slimy tassel.” It describes a slug’s eye view of courtship. The elegant illustration of banana slugs (Ariolimax californicus) on a catkin (Garrya elliptica) is by Jessica Bailey. The heading indicates that this poem is page one of another new collection, Field Guide to Imaginary Species of California. It appears that we can look forward to more work from this outstanding speculative poet. Highly recommended especially for those of us who love science that shades into a light frisson of (never heavy-handed) horror.

 

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Sandra Lindow has served as Vice President and Acting President of SFPA. Her poetry has been seen in various markets including Asimov’s, Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares, Dwarf Stars, and the Rhysling Anthologies. Her spec related editing includes Dwarf Stars, Eye to the Telescope, and most recently the Rhysling winners anthology, Alchemy of Stars II.  She lives on a hilltop in Menomonie, Wisconsin where she waits out the pandemic and attempts various strategies to keep varmints from eating her vegetables and perennials.

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