Sundress Reads: Review of Bargaining with the Fall

While I read Alison Palmer’s Bargaining with the Fall (Broadstone Books, 2023) in my college’s library, I was trying hard to blink away tears. As someone all too familiar with grappling with the grief that surfaces when a loved one passes away, this collection was a punch to the gut (in the best way possible). In her collection, Palmer showcases how grief seeps into every aspect of life, even affecting the speaker’s dog whose “been throwing up for days” (6). The speaker recalls intimate details about the subject of these poems; the remnants of this person once overlooked while they were still alive now hold more weight. Images such as a dandruff-filled brush, moth-receipts, and “those things you stab between your teeth” (27) paint an intimate portrait of the “you” of this collection, making me as a reader feel connected. 

Palmer cleverly employs images to convey the depth of grief. In “If Part of Woven Sun,” Palmer uses language to create a visual for how long one’s life is. She writes, 

“Force me to listen to you

closely, to consider your shortened thread

of life with a measuring rod” (4). 

The physicality of this image makes it so haunting and heartbreaking. The concept of measuring someone’s life—something so precious—with a measuring rod, lingers with me. I think about my childhood friend who passed away at eighteen, how short her measuring rod would be. This line also speaks to the heart wrenching fact that some people are remembered not for their life, but for their death. How sometimes we fail to remember what a late friend or family member laughed at, what their favorite song was, what food makes us think of them. Instead, we focus on the details of their ending: where they ended, how old they were, how it happened. 

In “Your Shadow, At First Meaning Me,” I was moved by how evocative and striking the language was, as well as how the speaker aims to reimagine death as something that shouldn’t be experienced in isolation from others. The poem powerfully begins with the line: “Finality should be shared, shouldn’t it” (5). Palmer ends this first line with a period, instead of a question mark, signifying that this isn’t a question the speaker is asking for reassurance, it’s a statement they are telling the reader. When I encountered this line, I thought of “finality” as referring to death, the end of something or someone. I interpreted this line in two ways: death should be shared, and, grief should not be experienced alone. Later on in the poem, the speaker goes on to “Re-imagine our first cries; they sound almost like the last” (5). Here the speaker suggests that there is little difference between someone’s first laugh as a newborn and someone’s last laugh, later in life as an adult. The speaker poses the notion that birth and death really aren’t that different from each other. The use of “our” here suggests a collective birth and death. Perhaps the speaker is reimagining or rewriting this person’s death to cope, wondering what if they had died together so this person didn’t have to experience death alone. 

Palmer doesn’t shy away from honesty throughout  Bargaining with the Fall, even in the speaker’s most vulnerable moments. In “The Falling Bargain,” the speaker asks, “I repeat you / mid-panic / over and over; which moment is best to save you?” (42). This line perfectly encapsulates the feeling of guilt that arises after a loved one has passed away, when you can’t help but look at yourself in the mirror and wonder if you could go back in time, if there was anything you could have done to save them. I found comfort in reading these words; they made me feel less alone in my own feelings of guilt surrounding the death of a loved one. In the following poem “Don’t Wait Until the Bitter End,” the speaker confesses, “I want / to keep the succulents alive, to prove I can” (43). This line tackles the experience of wanting to prove to others, and maybe even to yourself, that you’re still capable of living even amidst the grief. That you’re still able to go on with life, to live in this world, without this person you love in it. 

Palmer doesn’t dance around feelings, doesn’t care to make grief palatable and sugarcoated. Palmer ends the poem “Answer Me” with the line, “Sometimes, being lonely means lulling / into the safety of it” (11). There is so much loneliness in grief. Almost four years after a personal loss of my own, reading this collection made me feel seen in my grief that still lingers. When I found out about the death of my childhood friend from my mother, I couldn’t get out of bed for days. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that I had to live in a world without her in it, didn’t understand why I deserved to live but she didn’t. I wish I had Bargaining with the Fall back in 2020, when I was coping, but I’m glad I have these poems today. Better late than never.

Bargaining with the Fall can be found at Broadstone Books

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Annalisa Hansford (they/them) studies Creative Writing at Emerson College. Their poetry appears or is forthcoming in The West Review, The Lumiere Review, and Heavy Feather Review. They are the co-editor-in-chief of hand picked poetry, a poetry editor for The Emerson Review and Hominum Journal, and a reader for Sundress Publications.