Magicicada

“‘The essence of the cicada,’ Claire Millikin says, ‘is burial and ascension,’ which is also the essence of this stunning book, Magicicada. Grounded in the experience of a young teen’s solitary confinement (for truancy and silence, her only defense against violation), these poems draw on metaphor, and linguistic fluidity to suggest how the mind encounters and resists its own destruction. Seeing in the cicadas an emblem of confinement and release, Millikin says, ‘You don’t spend 17 years buried without the need to make a song.’ And sing she does—a haunting song that draws on all the resources of language, making a kind of litany against the brutality of isolation. It is a song that can’t be written prettily, the poet says. But it can be written with a light touch, with suppleness and complexity, drawing on layers of experience, and wonder as well, until the writing itself becomes a fierce ascension. These brilliant poems are thrillingly alive with a beauty that goes far beyond pretty, a beauty that can break your heart. That is, break it open.”
—Betsy Sholl, author As If a Song Could Save You

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“I try to come back to myself. // Given what I have seen” Millikin writes in “Statuary of Roadside Motels,” one of many rich, haunting poems in Magicicada that unearth the horrors of Millikin’s and the American past and create a new, nuanced perspective out of that resurrection. What Millikin has seen is horrifying, from sexual abuse to solitary confinement, and her trauma returns periodically, like the life cycle of the magicicada, who live for spans of 13 or 17 years as “burrowing nymphs in the ground” before emerging, en mass, to reproduce for a few weeks before dying. Throughout, she links what she’s seen to the cicadas, finding surprising yet resonant connections: “The electrocardiogram of the cicada is not dissimilar / from the pulse of my father in his eighty-sixth year.”
—Claire Millikin

Millikin structures her collection according to numbered “Brood”s and her overarching narrative with the language of this insect’s essence, especially its cycles of “burial and ascension.” The result explores fraught metamorphoses as Millikin lays bare delusions of safety, justice, family, and the American myth. Neither Millikin nor America at large here experience a linear timeline but rather something more like a wheel, continually turning. “The story is a sting, immortal,” and “ancestors are buried, // which should be an ending but isn’t” because history is a constant process of death and rebirth.

There is no resolution to this process for Millikin, no forgetting or solving the scars of the past; “the magicicada lift // carrying earth’s buried errata, // tearing open a tarnished sky, // where Jefferson’s slaves labored.” However, through this powerful reckoning with America’s collective identity, rooted in both ingenuity and unfathomable violence, Millikin’s poetry suggests that we attain something akin to the angelic nobility of the cicada, making music that echoes “the sound of stars,” and carrying in congregation the paradox of progress and renewal. It is no coincidence Millikin this publication year: “2024, they say, will be a magical year for cicada broods.”

Takeaway: Brooding, revelatory poems that meditate on cicadas and cycles.

Comparable Titles: Rickey Laurentiis’s “Southern Gothic,” Lucille Clifton’s “Sorrows”

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