Andrew Lundwall’s Windmilling, published through his Scantily Clad Press, begins with a non-prose proem of sorts, “sebastian says”, an introduction of a boy who himself serves as a voice to introduce tools of transition: “i’ve got big stairs”, “where’s my chalk”, “my bicycle recycled”. The conclusion, “bring to me what was my catholic chalk” leads to the question of whether the rest of the poems are written in this ex-catholic calcium sulfate (and if so what color it is). There is no answer, but the question is enough, shifting us into an uncertain space the rest of the poems explore (or perhaps do not).

The second poem, “recovery” presents us with a speaker in a threshold state of eyes unrecovered (as yet) from something; we don’t know what from– a mystery that shifts the focus directly to the liminality of the pre-recovery state. And “who are you then” to hold the person’s eyes in your beauty, or is the addressee a disease? The continuation from there to “every tree / is its own apocalypse / and my mind’s shutter in” places tree in close proximity to eye and mind so that it becomes transitional, both a literal tree that dies eventually and so contains its own end (apocalypse) or to a dendritic nerve which, in being its own apocalypse, may suggest the cause of the shut up mind.

Then “whistler” continues the eye theme but only through a synaesthetic transition: “blind hands / of . . . stars” that “fall into the graffiti / of her moist lap”. Who is this woman with the painted thighs? Her occluded identity is not so important as the fall or change of the stars, which allies her with the addressee of “recovery” and makes her thus, perhaps, the cause of the stars’ blindness, the location of which in hands suggests an inability on the part of stars to touch. Indeed, they are too hot until they reach something damp (like paint still drying or sweaty August skin).

“powder this however” takes movement as its theme yet sits in a space between movement and stasis because it concludes with two lines that together repeat the title. Perhaps the movement is illusory, hallucinatory, a frantic nothingness conjured by “the cocaine glow of go”. Its possible unreality, too, points back to the collection’s title’s reference to Don Quixote, though the action of windmilling begins from a closer-to-real place than tilting at windmills does. (We could say it dwells on the threshold between real and unreal.)

With “memory’s trooperwomen” we have a return to the eyes, though here it is in “eyeshades”, suspended between being eyes and not eyes. There is a similar sort of threshold space occupied by the line “my body sunk in real lobotomy” as the effects of lobotomy on the mind are much more commonly considered. This line, then, seeks to eliminate the Cartesian divide and thus make both halves both-and spaces, fully integrated and liminal instead of only liminal on the thin and impossible threshold.

Then comes “solitude deluxe”, beginning with the transition into solitude, “the shock of / intimate fade”. This phrases richly describes that slip from closeness to alone-ness more fully its ambiguity: does intimacy shock and then this shock fade, or does the fading of intimacy fade? Either way, it is followed by fragile efforts– “eggshells”– to hold onto the form of nearness, “her silhouettes”.

The next poem, “blaring loss” brings her back along with “cocaine face of burden”. The drawing back together of various strands, however, brings no sense of conclusion, only one of continued change and uncertainty. It starts to become threatening: “on all fours blaring loss”, “excessive strip club mouths / that screw chunks of sleep” with overtones of toothy mouths devouring chunks of meat, “a wilderness urge bewitching” could draw you to your death, and “into neon veins that blaze” (high? drugged? dying bright?) “smoke the heavens’ fingertip”. Something has transmogrified.

Finally, then, we get a name: “sophie”. What does she do that’s so important as to earn a name when even the speaker goes by pronoun? “sophie’s hands [are they blind like the stars'?] / reload my shadow / rewind my window”; they add substance and thus emphasize the liminal nature of a shadow, and they alter through time the threshold between the inside and the world (perhaps this threshold is also an eye). She leads to a perception of a world where everyone is altered, everyone is high– “bourbon babies”, “a meth-addicted monk”– except perhaps the “groaning metallic / gruntworkers”, though they are changed into the material with which they work. Her rewinding of the windows may even be what is required for the speaker to see any of the scene described after the first three lines of this final poem– or, indeed, in the act of rewinding and going back in time, it may be what’s required to see anything witnessed in the previous poems– a possibility which makes this figure worthy of a name that approaches that of the personification of wisdom, Sophia.

And so the reader windmills through these possibilities, turning through and crossing thresholds, creating their own and always, always imagining the answers.