Conditions of the Wounded & Anger Management Cocktails
Image courtesy of University of Wisconsin Press.
Book: Conditions of the Wounded
We’ve all been here before: the alarm goes off and you force your body out of bed and towards whatever morning routine you have before it suddenly hits you. It’s Friday. Your weekend is burgeoning. Bleary-eyed, you think that’s the right use of “burgeoning.” Already, your day is off to a good start. Work rolls on—another day in paradise—and before you know it, it’s happy hour. You’re at a sports bar, a local dive, or maybe one of those hip and fun places in the art district of wherever you live, a bar that’s basically a dive bar with lipstick, over priced everything served in a fancy glass with a witty name. ESPN is on, because it’s always on, the Bud Light of bar entertainment, and somewhere between your third and fourth drink you see them: head down, shoulder’s hunched and hair in corn rows, gloved fists bobbing as they move towards each other, muscles lean and fierce. It’s MMA, it’s UFC. They’re women. And you’re intrigued. And enamored as they proceed over many rounds to kick the absolute shit out of each other. It takes a certain person, you think. A certain kind of woman to do that.
And you’d be right. Peak fighting condition is more than training and discipline. It’s a willingness to suffer. To be a fighter, to commit your life to entering the ring again and again, after the validation of winning and the crush of defeat, you’d need more than determination.
The poems in Anna Leigh Knowles’ collection, Conditions of the Wounded, are a lot like the stuff you can’t see about a fighter. They’re the experiences and lessons that built the fighter, her mentality. These poems are what taught her to fight.
I have these fantasies of an unknown flag draped around my shoulders— loyalty for the oblique, repping for the pre-defeated, running toward this pacing mercenary who has every intent to kill me. Someone is screaming my name and it’s the voice of my mother, or a dead friend. Doesn’t matter—they’re all looking for me now. Someone takes off my shirt because I can’t with gloves on. All around me, dark figures congregate. Someone is rubbing my eyes and blowing gently. Someone kisses my forehead. There is music. Chanting and opalescence. Bets are being made. My sister is there—she’s hanging onto the cage, yelling our family name. I never see who I fight, but I’ve felt her pace. I’ve tapped gloves on that heat and walked away.
Whoever she is, she’s just like me.
Like a training montage, the poems in Conditions of the Wounded are brief scenes of hard moments, of lockdowns in school from active shooters and AA meetings with parents, of funerals and memorials of children—friends—lost to gun violence, of alcohol abuse and court-ordered anger management. These scenes play out one after another and work to reveal the human cost of a world full of loss and violence and untended sorrow: “If we were losing ourselves—getting by with the new truths of our small lives which we and the world would meet each day, we didn’t know. Our world asked for souls, and we paid with the weight of having lived” (10). It’s easy, too, to see these poems individually, to look at the collection as one difficult scene after another. It shouldn’t surprise you that, in a collection called Conditions of the Wounded, the joy here is far and few between, and always mixed with something hard with sharp edges. But it isn’t a collection of individually rough and exposed experiences. It’s a totality, the story you need to hear before you can understand what really needs saying.
It’s also a condemnation. Of the unnecessary loss of life to gun violence, of the double standards for women, of the America that led to a new generation of fighters, which, if you’re paying attention to these poems, means an America that lets people suffer for character development. These poems don’t say It doesn’t have to be like this. Instead, they say This is how it is by showing you the montage, by having you feel it through the moments captured inside the collection in Knowles’ terrifyingly well-wrought lyrical style.
“—the girl above ground
sounding as though she had seen the future and survived.”-The Bomb Shelter (4)
“let the dead dream along the churning edges of earth.
All the surprises ahead of me I already know.”-Aftermath (84)
Like any good montage, one scene leads to the next, building on what came before to grow and swell with the music’s crescendo. Structurally, the collection works the same way and makes a progressive sense that is lost if poems are taken out of turn. The best example of this is the final poem, “Aftermath,” which is the poem equivalent of a fully trained fighter, backlit at the arena’s open doors, girded for battle and stepping towards the ring. It’s a culmination of what came before, and it has a mean hook: “I have tried to say this other ways—we were damaged. Cold mountain mornings, broken branches trembled in our drowsy air.”
In a lot of ways, the first stanza of the last poem echoes the first stanza of the first poem, “The Bomb Shelter,” as well: “In our backyard, a pipe rose through the ground like a periscope. No one followed us into that hollow”. The exception between them is the interjection of the “I”, the speaker. She’s no longer talking in description, working through imagery to get at her point. She’s present and standing tall in the final poem, and the first word in “Aftermath.” And while “The Bomb Shelter” is about not having a voice—about not being allowed to have a voice, and searching for it—“Aftermath” is about how much has already been said and shown, through cause and effect, in the hard work and language of the collection. “Aftermath” also reveals growth through its three-line stanzas compared to the brief two-line stanzas of “The Bomb Shelter.” The speaker has more to express and a new willingness to express it.
“Aftermath” returns to form in its end, however, the last stanza returning to the two-line format that echoes the same sentiment found at the end of “The Bomb Shelter” but changed. In the story’s first poem, the speaker is underground listening to the girl above who is speaking “as though she had seen the future and survived,” while the final poem reveals the speaker in the way the girl above ground was, declaring that “all the surprises ahead of [her she] already know[s].” It’s an powerful end to a powerful collection, and an eerie reminder that no matter how much situations and people change a part of the old will always remain.
Anger Management Cocktails
Cocktail: Training Montage
I’m always a little angry. There is a punching bag hanging in my garage. I’m not one for the footwork but I hit hard. I can’t lift myself into the rafters, but I do sit-ups on a piece of plywood the size of a folding chair. The more stress, the higher I pull my hair.
-”Topknots and Vaseline” (Tin House).
The Training Montage is long, bright, and enlightening. It readies you for the real fight ahead, a great conflict—the Big Bad, whatever it is. It cannot prepare you for everything. There are bitter times ahead, dry spells. But there will always be the memory of the montage, and the bright taste of it in your memory as you strive through these hard times towards the good. A sort of punch, the cocktail is built with Colorado Bourbon, Sherry, Raspberry & Mint Oleo, Lemon Juice, and lengthened with Lime Topo Chico into something brisk but furtive.
Inspired by the metaphor of the fight, and the very real fight that continues against gun violence, this punch-esque cocktail is light and bright, and surreptitiously powerful, the perfect guide on your way through Conditions of the Wounded.
Training Montage
2oz Colorado Bourbon (Breckenridge)
0.5oz Amontillado Sherry
1oz Raspberry & Mint Oleo*
1oz Lemon Juice
Lime Topo Chico to top
Place ice in your glass.
Add all ingredients (except Topo Chico) to a mixing tin; shake with ice and strain into glass until half full.
Top with Topo Chico and add a straw; give the cocktail a few turns to gently integrate the drink.
Group Montage ( makes 4 drinks, about 18oz)
8oz (1c) Bourbon
2oz (0.25c) Amontillado Sherry
4oz (0.5c) Raspberry & Mint Oleo
4oz (0.5c) Lemon Juice
Chilled Bottles of Lime Topo Chico to top
In a punch bowl, add all ingredients except for Topo Chico; add enough ice that the bowl is packed. (Don’t stir or mix.)
(Optional:) Place lemon wheels on the surface of the punch.
Keep chilled Lime Topo Chicos nearby for guests to top their punch with as they see fit.
This can be made up to 48 hours in advanced; any longer and the Lemon Juice will grow slightly bitter with time (as will we all).
*Raspberry & Mint Oleo: In a Tupperware, add one pint of Raspberries (about 6oz), one long stem and leaves of mint (4-6 leaves), and half a cup of white sugar (4oz). Gently muddle sugar into berries to break them up. Cover the container and allow to sit, refrigerated for at least 12 hours and for up to 48. Strain through a fine mesh strainer, and bottle & refrigerate for up to 6 months.
Cocktail: Boon
Late spring and juniper berries sprawl
along the sidewalks of County Line Road.Now early morning snow crowns the ridgelines,
claims the flatlands in scratches
and garlands the oaks behind St. Michael’s like spliced dovetails.Here is the beginning of a season holding its breath
for a sacrament that never reaches grace.
Here are all the stains in the glass where the light decays.-”Gospel with Quarrel and Hapless Prayer” (11)..
When something good happens, when life gives you a gift—when, among all the hard times and bad news, the materialistic politics and disregard for life—that’s called a “Boon”. A gift, an answer to a prayer. Something to be thankful for.
Inspired by the wilderness imagery, Boon is a whiskey sour made with Bourbon, bitter-sweet Alpine Amaro, Grapefruit Juice, rich demerara syrup and cocoa molasses. It’s made luxurious and soft with the inclusion of an egg white. Like the precarious balance of verdant landscape imagery and difficult moments, this cocktail is both sweet and bitter in equal measures.
Boon
2oz Bourbon
0.5oz Amaro Alta Verde
0.25oz Cocoa Molasses*
0.25oz Rich Demerara Syrup (2:1)
1oz Grapefruit Juice
1 White of a Large Egg
Add all ingredients to a tin and shake without ice for 30 seconds.
Add ice to shaker and shake hard for an additional 15 seconds.
Double strain into a coupe glass.
*Cocoa Molasses: You can find this at most Mediterranean grocers. It’s also great in beef stew, or with soda water and bitters (1oz Molasses, 2 dashes bitters, 3-4oz Soda Water; Pomegranate Juice Optional).