In the Aftermath: 9/11 Through a Volunteer’s Eyes
Beth SKMorris
North Street Book Prize 2024 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Poetry
Critique by Jendi Reiter
What happens to a historical catastrophe when it becomes over-memorialized and under-analyzed—just one more occasion for memes, action movies, annual displays of patriotic sentiment, and tourist attractions? Beth SKMorris's poetry collection In the Aftermath: 9/11 Through a Volunteer's Eyes poses that question about the terrorist attack that destroyed New York City's Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
Why did I feel compelled to explain "9/11" just now? Maybe it's because I watched the Towers go up in smoke from my office window at Facts on File News Service, an educational publisher where we editors learned to include every important date, location, and official title for future students who would not recognize the current affairs references we took for granted. Or maybe because a new generation has already reached adulthood in a country where this landmark has never not been gone. Gen Z makes edgelord jokes about the Towers while Prospect Park burns from climate change.
SKMorris's tightly plotted collection starts by showing us scenes we know all too well—the gray ash of buildings and bodies coating Lower Manhattan, the weary firefighters and EMTs, the makeshift memorials and missing-person posters. But then she follows up, as few writers on this topic have done, with a montage of scenes stretching over the next 19 years.
We are compelled to notice the first responders and nearby residents who came down with cancer from toxins released by the burning skyscrapers. These unsung victims strive for proper diagnosis and compensation while the public's attention has long moved on to other terrorist attacks, now committed by Americans against one another ("Charleston,/Orlando,/Newtown..." she lists in the powerful poem "The Survivor Tree").
In "Unclaimed", SKMorris lists some final remnants of the disaster that the government no longer wants to store as of 2015 ("Mannequins/dressed in Victoria's/Secret tops, stand as if/beckoning to shoppers/long gone"). These lonely discards contrast with the equally mundane objects that survivors treasured in the immediate aftermath, souvenirs that stood in for unrecoverable bodies. Whatever lessons we were supposed to learn about national unity, peace, or the preciousness of human life, we would rather go back to business as usual. "Everything we redeem in the aftermath succumbs/to language and time." ("Masters of Forgetting")
The poems themselves are as supple and economical as the collection's structure. They do what they need to do, and stop. Their endings are strong. The book suffers somewhat from the fact that the scenes in the first half have already been obsessively documented. There wasn't really a new angle in terms of imagery or political understanding.
The book design is professional and easy to read, with a large font and good centering on the page. The black-and-white cover photo features a dramatic close-up of a fallen beam and crooked nails through a haze of smoke, giving an impression that is elegiac and literary. This smooth-flowing collection would be a good addition to a high school social studies curriculum. For those of us who lived through the event, it's a cathartic and tender read.
Read an excerpt from In The Aftermath (PDF)
Buy this book on Amazon. For a signed copy, please email the author.
