Cid Galicia Reviews “The Flightless Years” by Jamie L. Smith

“God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions.
Once we begin to ask them, there’s no turning back.“

-Gloria Steinem

“Myths which are believed in, tend to become true.”                                                 

-George Orwell

Navigating the poems in Jamie Smith’s collection, The Flightless Years, is akin to experiencing MTV’s The Real World – Greek Mythos Season.

What happens when you put Chronos, Apollo, Artemis, Persephone, Alice, J, the speaker, and her mother in the same room? Apollo’s sun chariot is stolen and turned into a green 97 Geo Tracker. Children are consumed by their parents, only to be explosively reborn. Ambrosian-stardust addiction leads to tragedy and allies turn into enemies. It is an incredibly well-constructed catastrophe. When we deem those around us godlike, be they family or friends, darker realities are revealed.

The myths predate forgiveness. Lighting, fire, wrath, and flood—the early Gods were invested in violence. I don’t know when this changed, when we came to believe in supreme benevolence. In the time before forgiveness, there was only revenge or rescue.

The Opening

Let us dive into a journey of shifting galaxies – divine comedies and tragedies, realities and fictions, family and fatality, romance and wreckage. 

Before she forces her readers to these depths, Smith benevolently opens up this collection by way of a very seductive piece titled Stingray. This poem is a siren’s lure to the pleasure and pain that the reader will witness. Before the final line, which disrobes the speaker to her lover, there are shared bodies of exploration – scars, birthmarks, knees, tongues, clavicles, and thighs.

Smith is the Hephaestus of poem endings, and many of her poems close with the finest metallurgy or lava-like drippings of lines. The final line in Stingray…

Enough words for tonight. 

Section I

In the first section, we meet the three primary women that readers will follow throughout the collection: The speaker, the speaker’s lover Alice, and the speaker’s mother, who is continuously transmorphing her character between Artemis, Persephone, Chronos, and many others. Many poems in the first section are snaring serpents lying in wait to strike. The Flightless Years is a constellation, both in format and phrases, that introduces the stage of mythology, exploring a mother and daughter’s relationship.

Rat Nest is an origin story of how the lowest of creatures, suffering the hells of this world, also possess an immortal instinct to survive. When We Were Young I Never Lost Or Won introduces the adolescent curiosities to tempt death and daring, pitting the mind and body against freeways and freight trains. In The Closet brings us back to the opening poem, Stingray perhaps, introducing us to the narrator’s Alice. But what is very special is the reader’s introduction to the first three of nine, Flawed Mythologies.

These are a series of lyrical essays of the speaker’s desire, or curse, to recall the relationships with the loved ones from her life. In FMI the speaker is forced to return to and recycle the myths – as she comes to terms with the falling of her once godlike friend, J. FMII, a goddess mother training her daughter to survive the battles in the desolate lands of this world–This was the game: she would say, “Hit me,” and I would refuse. And FMIII–

I remember her holding me under water until I inhaled silt. Then she saved me. Which fact matters more? She was just playing.

Section II & III

After mentors, thresholds, tests/enemies/allies, there is the internal battle of the self–the innermost cave.  The poem, In Praise of Variance, captures this in these lines:

My mother taught me
there’s a certain grace in giving up
on the hope of relief.

In the same section, the poem, Leap Years, situates the reader with the speaker in Brooklyn. This poem captivated me immediately with the vivid description of the Domino Sugar Refinery. It hits close to home for me because we have a sister Domino factory here in New Orleans. I have also witnessed in solace, and sorrow, the hazy neon lights smoking into the sunset from the west bank of the Mississippi River.

the Domino sugar factory sign,
its dead neon

glowing alive.
The dome of the sky becomes

clear to us—a half-sphere
lit at its edges, a cat’s-claw-moon

In this section, FMIV and FMV, a god falls to darkness, and so does a piece of the heart of the narrator, who had always been a faithful believer. She must fight through herself and her experience with her mother, as her friend J with his father, to perhaps die, be reborn, and return home with the elixir to survive.

I am my mother’s daughter. J was his father’s son. Some violences transmit
from generation to generation. But our actions were our own.

Section III closes with FMVI, a tale of humans’ desire for the ambrosia of the gods. When they attempt to create it on their own, it is tainted with ambition and escapism.

Years ago, a batch of heroin called Raptor led to a dozen overdose deaths in New York and New Jersey. It was cut with Ajax. Before Raptor there was Icarus. The tiny bag had a red wing stamped on its side.

In drug-speak, when someone injects for the first time, they say they’ve gotten their wings. This is the story of Pegasus, the white horse the heroes rode to freedom.

Red Bull says its wings will make you fly. Heroin turned Raptor cut with Ajax–says it will make you die…

Section IV

I will leave the final section for each to venture through on their own and close on this: The Flightless Years is a modern day lyrical epic and fantasy on the war of love – for ourselves, our friends, our family, and our gods.

Smith, for me, becomes Hermes as the writer of this collection. Like Hermes, she is the harbinger between boundaries and transitions. She writes many roads, thresholds, borders, and all forms of crossings between worlds – both literal and mythical. She guides readers through her personal journey, allowing them to relate with their own experiences, find their own elixirs of survival, and bring them home.

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Jamie L. Smith holds an MFA from Hunter College (2020) and a PhD in English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Utah (2024). Her poems, nonfiction, and hybrid works appear in publications including Bellevue Literary Review, Red Noise Collective, Southern Humanities Review, Tusculum Review, The Write Launch, Red Wheelbarrow, and elsewhere. She lives and writes between Salt Lake and New York City and is an Assistant Professor of English at Utah Asia Campus in Songdo, South Korea.

The Flightless Years is available from Finishing Line Press.