 | It’s rare to read a poetry book where every poem is impactful—such was my experience with Andrea Gibson’s You Better Be Lightning. The language is straightforward and accessible, and each poem is like an exquisite short story, taking the reader on an intense emotional journey. The poem “Queer Youth are Five Times More Likely to Die by Suicide” is an immersive dive into the painful world of LQBTQ+ youth. The entire poem is a tour de force, but I found these lines particularly poignant: Burning for eternity seems five times more doable than another day in the school lunchroom. |
“The Year of No Grudges” begins with this stanza:
I know most people try hard
to do good and find out to late
they should have tried softer.
A second excerpt:
Where I come from, you can drive/
a pickup truck from one side
of the lake to the others, and people
have an unusually high quantity/
of missing teeth and fingers,
but you can still count on them
to buy whitening strips and wedding rings
Another excerpt:
Burning to be better is my favorite
quality on anyone, and you are on fire
I know most people try hard
to do good and find out to late
they should have tried softer.
A second excerpt:
Where I come from, you can drive/
a pickup truck from one side
of the lake to the others, and people
have an unusually high quantity/
of missing teeth and fingers,
but you can still count on them
to buy whitening strips and wedding rings
Another excerpt:
Burning to be better is my favorite
quality on anyone, and you are on fire
 | The poem “Time Piece” had a couple of stanzas that deeply resonated with me: My friend wakes up at noon. Goes to bed at eight. Wants less time because she wants less pain. And this quotable passage: Regret is a time machine to the past. Worry is a time machine to the future. Gratitude is a time machine to the future. |
My favorite lines in “Every Time I Ever Said I Want to Die”:
Sometimes grief is the fastest route to truth.
Also:
What if we don’t have to be healed
to be whole? There are holes in every inch
Of the fabric that makes me who I am
And:
…a difficult life is not less
worth living than a gentle one. Joy is just easier
to carry than sorrow
Sometimes grief is the fastest route to truth.
Also:
What if we don’t have to be healed
to be whole? There are holes in every inch
Of the fabric that makes me who I am
And:
…a difficult life is not less
worth living than a gentle one. Joy is just easier
to carry than sorrow
 | “Instead of Depression,” Call it Hibernation. …Name your hopelessness a quiet hollow, a place you go to heal, a den you dug, Sweetheart, instead of a grave. |
“What Love Is” tells the story of the poet on tour with their girlfriend and performing near the girlfriend’s estranged parents. Their girlfriend is thrilled that her parents want to see the show, a first step toward reconciliation. The parents are painfully stiff and out of place among the lavender-haired queers in the audience.
The poet has been handed a flyer and asked to announce an anti-fracking protest; the girlfriend’s father works in fracking.
Here are two short scenes from the poem:
Resting the flyer for the protest at my feet so I could announce it near the end, I told myself, If you are going to be anything in the world tonight, you better be lightning. You better find something in you honest enough to strike them.
After the show, the poet feels ashamed because she never announced the protest, a violation of her own progressive politics, but in the greenroom backstage:
. . . her father burst through the door, his head nearly axing a hole through the ceiling, tears, like a giant’s tears, covering his face. I’m seventy-six years old, he said, and I just tonight figured out what love is.
The closing lines:
There is no moral of this story. It’s just a moment in my life where I did something wrong, and the earth, who has never not known what love is, held me anyway.
The poet has been handed a flyer and asked to announce an anti-fracking protest; the girlfriend’s father works in fracking.
Here are two short scenes from the poem:
Resting the flyer for the protest at my feet so I could announce it near the end, I told myself, If you are going to be anything in the world tonight, you better be lightning. You better find something in you honest enough to strike them.
After the show, the poet feels ashamed because she never announced the protest, a violation of her own progressive politics, but in the greenroom backstage:
. . . her father burst through the door, his head nearly axing a hole through the ceiling, tears, like a giant’s tears, covering his face. I’m seventy-six years old, he said, and I just tonight figured out what love is.
The closing lines:
There is no moral of this story. It’s just a moment in my life where I did something wrong, and the earth, who has never not known what love is, held me anyway.
 | From “The Test of Time” (note: the poet has Lyme Disease): “I can’t always tell the difference between my gifts and my tragedies. What I’ve lost / in health I’ve gained in access to my own empathy. And: …there is a test we can take to find out the future. It’s called the test of time. And what you do is you live/ until you die. And you refuse to let the hands of your clock curl into fists to fight the [life] lessons off. Even if the lessons / are brutally hard. |
Some quotable lines from various poems:
- Do you know fish are so sensitive/snowflakes sound like fireworks when they land/on the water? Do you know sea otters hold hands/when they sleep so they don’t drift apart? (“Homesick: A Plea for Our Planet”)
- …my still teenage sister/ was a million miles away/ in a trailer on the other side of town,/ men twice her age offering needles/ for her arm so she could sew herself/ backward, unmake her own life/ one fix at a time. (“Love Letter to the Tick That Got me Sick”)
- How did you come to believe/ that hating yourself would protect you/ from other people’s hate? (“Aliens Explain Why They Are Visiting Earth”)
- Is my attention on loving/ or my attention on/ who isn’t loving me? (“Wellness Check”)
- …every falling leaf is a tiny kite/ with a string too small to see, held/ by the part of me in charge/ of making beauty/ out of grief. (“How the Worst Day of My Life Became the Best”)
- We call the weather beautiful/ because there are no more snowmen in Colorado,/ but there are men with cold hearts . . . Who buy stock in war and cancer and poverty. Who buy stock in extinction. (“Not Alone”)
 | Part of the pleasure of these poems is their well-crafted structure as in the pair of poems: “The Call, Option 1” and “The Call, Option 2,” both concerned with calling someone who sexually abused the poet in childhood. The first version is vindictive: you will always be held down/ by what you held down. And: …what does the boy you once were/ think of the man you became? The second version starts with this line: There is a world in which you did not touch me. She imagines a world where he holds no fear over them: In this world I don’t panic when I see a pink tricycle/ in your neighbor’s driveway . . . |
Also impressive, “The Night Shift” takes us on a journey through the poet’s job as night-supervisor at a home for wayward girls. The poem balances the poet learning her duties with harrowing vignettes of the individual girls: one whose mother says she’ll visit but never shows, another who isn’t allowed razors.
This collection of poems is emotionally raw, yet full of grace and lyrical beauty. These are poems where gratitude and forgiveness inevitably triumph over pain and despair. Highly recommended.
Find You Better be Lightning online or at your local library. Gold Medal Winner of the Feathered Quill Book Awards and the Independent Publisher Book Awards.
Find You Better be Lightning online or at your local library. Gold Medal Winner of the Feathered Quill Book Awards and the Independent Publisher Book Awards.
Another fabulous poetry book: Not a Princess
