The Autobiography of Rain

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RAIN, Lana Hechtman Ayers. Fernwood Press, 2024.

Lana Hechtman Ayers is a one-woman poetry dynamo. She is the managing editor of three Pacific Northwest poetry presses: MoonPath Press, Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, and World Enough Writers. She also leads generative workshops, helps people assemble their books of poems, teaches at conferences, and writes her own poetry. To borrow the phrasing from the end of her poem, “A Blue True Dream,” her writing mantra must be “yes and yes and / illimitably yes.”

In The Autobiography of Rain, her eleventh and most recent collection of poems, rain patters, welcome, relieving. “The rain is my best friend,” she writes in “Nineteen Things No One Knows about Me (And One They Do)”: “She knows how to keep a secret / and wash away the evidence.” Humor, sometimes, but rain also shows up hand-in-hand with grief. In “Landscape in Dreams”:

Where is it you go
when I lose sight of you in fog?
I’m certain I’ve seen you in dreams
that smell of burnt toast
On rainy days your laughter chimes
raindrops against roof gutter (27)

Oliver de la Paz uses these words to praise the book: “The fickle and atmospheric weather of losses, revelations, and heartbreak shifts and shimmers.” In poems such as “Reasons to Live,” and “On the Nature of Grief,” I was reminded that indeed this is poetry that “shifts and shimmers,” that encompasses, becomes a voice talking back to you on a suicide hotline, sits beside you, faithful as a loved dog.

But these poems can also provide a nudge out of yourself, a gentle push toward something brighter.

“Poetry reveals there is no empty space”

—Hafiz

Out of the void: dishes, dust, screens, fire fight, firefly
glimpses, tipsy kisses, too little, too much, lingering
rosemary, cups of coffee, bitterness of heartbreak, guitar
chords from the basement, implicit threat, green rage,
Stevie Wonder, Beethoven, Janis Joplin, the Kosciuszko
Bridge, windows open wide, something unforgivable,
traffic, too hot, too cold, weight squarely in my body,
wooden spoon, stream, salt of grief, loneliness, barking
dog, pearls, pencils, hand stirring the pot, books, wind,
rain furrows, moonrise, alchemy, edgelessness, yawns.
It was a Monday.

—Lana Hechtman Ayers