You can buy the books we recommend on Bookshop on our list of LitStack Recs.
In This LitStack Review of Reveille by Liza Hudock
A Nub of Clay | “Reveille” by Liza Hudock
Wrestling With Grief
The title of Liza Hudock’s debut collection, Reveille, does double work, referencing both the poet’s military service (U.S. Coast Guard) and a more metaphoric wake up call. Centered on family and loss, these poems detail a sense of duty that clings beyond the grave. With a syntax spare and plain spoken as a morning bugle call, Hudock renders grief every which way as she wrestles it to the ground.
The powerful opening poems launch us into the heat of the moment, beginning with “Boy in a Red Waistcoat,” an Ars Poetica that sets out a warning about disappointed innocence: “How it can harden / you into an artifact / or it can be your / nub of clay.”
“Water and Oil” follows with a domestic scene that evokes a state of disorientation. We’re not sure who the speaker is: “It’s enough / to make you hate your own daughter.” There is a priest that zips away in a yellow Camaro. Atmospheric tension shows up as “clicking of the gas stove / trying to ignite.” Even the lineation resists order: Hudock throws a long line off balance by breaking it at an uneasy place and leaving a short fragment on the following line. And yet, the concrete details anchor the reader. I am compelled to read on.
Setting Scene And Introducing Characters
A speaker cares for a difficult dying mother in working class, rural or industrial mid-America. Religious iconography makes an appearance. An incarcerated brother and a missing father hint of harsh childhood. The speaker is close to Maddie, whose death is contemporaneous to the mother’s. “Pud” plays a stabilizing role.
Animals appear both literally and figuratively: mice that damage a fur coat, a largemouth bass, Medusa’s head of snakes. Death comes down a chimney like a pigeon. The brother finds a hidden stash of money like “an octopus who can find its way out of a jar with the lid screwed shut.”
“Wool Washing” (pg 36), expressed in 39 short lines that flow down the page in the manner of a creek like the one depicted within, is a good example of the many ways Reveille mines bereavement within context of the family background:
I like to wash wool blankets in a rubber tub, stomping as if I live on a vineyard, the detritus of a year squelching and puffing between my feet. I remember my great aunt who crocheted them, the darkly churning water of the creek behind her house, here viscous, here hissing, streaked with tannins, slipping forward, doubling back on itself.
The poem goes on to talk about cows on the opposite bank, “kicking / plumes of snow to form / a bony necklace around / their bale of hay:
This must be decorum. This is what I lack. Some weight around my neck and a cow’s habit of wearing it.
Conversational Voice
A group of my favorite poems tucked into the middle of Reveille features an easy conversational tone that belies the impact of the topic at hand. In “Crematory” (pg 33), a prose poem of notable restraint, the gruesome reality of cremating the mother’s corpse (“smaller than I remember, also narrower”) is delayed by a conversation with the man who works the furnace:
“Coveralls and welding gloves. He seems like a nice guy. He tells me I must try the water from their fountain, that it’s triple-filtered, the cleanest in the city, possibly the state. He insists two times. I suspect he’s setting up a joke, that the punchline has to do with ash and carbon filters, but I take a paper cone from the stack beside the fountain and he is right, their water is good.”
In “Whitman” (pg 34), the speaker addresses the father of free verse with irony and wit: “The week of Maddie’s memorial, I picked one of your poems to share in the group chat—it seemed like someone should read something at a memorial—and your poem came back with edits. A girl selling turkey legs at Disney thinks you use too many adverbs. A woman weaving circular blankets in rural Ohio finds your America too butch.”
Toward the final third of the book, the poems shift tonally to become more sober and reflective, and the material begins a turn toward epiphany. “Froggy Embrace” (pg 48), addresses the pain of not fully expressing oneself before death of a loved one. In “A Clear Immutable Truth” (pg 61), guilt slowly simmers into something like forgiveness:
When I don’t want to think alone, I make a soup. I make a soup and listen to it simmer like a mind with all the answers. I add a carrot, a bay leaf, a rib bone, fleck of star anise, a single fennel seed, and then consign my questions to the soup. My ingredients bob along the surface and I interpret the ways they roll as signs. I can live off soup forever, as long as certain subjects are not broached. One day, I peered into the pot and asked it straight up: Am I evil? A tiny bubble flicked my cheek with scalding oil—you are nerve and flesh.
Whether writing in lines of three or four beats, or stretching a thought longer across the page, Hudock’s cadence is musical. She has a light touch and often a subtle humor, even when rendering a tough moment. What better way to make loss a pleasurable read?
In the title poem, “Reveille” (pg 68), the speaker talks directly to the dead. I’m reminded of a class I took once during which the poet Marie Howe shared how she had revised one of her own poems so as to not tell her dead brother something he would already have known. In other words, the conversation became more authentic, rather than a story telling device intended more to inform the reader than the brother. Hudock does a little of both here. Her speaker begins with a redundant statement, but then proceeds into what feels like a real and present conversation:
You died four months ago and the sparrows still remember you. All I have to do
is show them the copper pot you used to fill with water
to fling at their bush for their manic chirping to cease.
Was the silence familiar when it first closed over your ears?
Of course, a conversation with the dead is of benefit only for the living. Later in the poem, the speaker expresses her appreciation for a calming interaction:
Once, you texted me a line of poetry.
It wasn’t one of the big ones, it was the kind of line I like.
The record of a life: and I have sat and watched the trees.
We always know where we are in Hudock’s poems. “Tansy” (pg 66) is an example of a two-part strategy, where first we’re given a description of nature to ground us in a physical place before entering an interior reflection:
A bog full of it and no one else around. Star-cluster blooms joy- yellow, each blossom a glowing dome like E.T.’s finger. Perhaps being a plant, tansy can indicate home without attachment, unlike E.T., unlike me…
…
… I dreamed Maddie was a ball of light. In a light-ball’s speechless manner she expressed herself to me. The dream got silly when the other burning balls conveyed that they were cats and dogs. Still, it was a nice dream. Full of love.
Hudock uses this outside/inside approach in the final poem of the book, “Storm” (pg 75), a beautifully lyric resolution that opens with “Chartreuse liquor-tinted air / could mean tornado” then moves to “In the kitchen, a ladybug / casts for a tear in the screen / door.” The final lines combine both:
… A fleecy cloud asserts eternal infancy against a darkening sky, gathers in and pulls apart, burgeons and frays, articulates in its meekness the very question that the storm draws out of you like scent from mud:
…
can you love me? …
The speaker addresses herself this time with the line, “can you love me?” This is the ultimate forgiveness the collection has been reaching for. Reveille is thoroughly satisfying, obsessive in its gaze. Hudock has introduced herself in this debut as a poet who never takes the easy way out.
~ Karen Hildebrand
About Liza Hudock
Poet Liza Hudock Photo by Michelle Getzen
Liza Hudock was born in Detroit, Michigan. After many moves, Liza resides there now. From 2017-2021, Liza was a Boatswain’s Mate in the U.S. Coast Guard. In 2024, Liza graduated from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Reveille is Liza Hudock’s first collection of poems.
Karen Hildebrand is a poet and dance critic. Her most recent publications include Grist, MER, New Ohio Review, Rust+Moth, Swannanoa Review, SWWIM, and Westchester Review. Her debut poetry collection, Crossing Pleasure Avenue, was released by Indolent Books in 2018. Her poetry reviews are published by Lily Poetry Review, Lightwood, and LEON. She is a frequent contributor of dance writing to The Brooklyn Rail and Fjord Review, and can be heard on the Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival podcast. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson Program for Writers.
You can find and buy the books we recommend at the LitStack Bookshop on our list of LitStack Recs.
As a Bookshop, Malaprop’s, BAM, Barnes & Noble, Audiobooks.com, Amazon, and Envato affiliate, LitStack may earn a commission at no cost to you when you purchase products through our affiliate links.
