Review
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Title: Making a Kingdom of It
Author: Lance Larsen
Publisher: University of Tampa Press
Year Published: 2024
Pages: 86
ISBN: 978-1597322140
Genre: Poetry
Reviewed by Hannah Lenning
Lance Larsen’s Making a Kingdom of It starts with a miracle and ends with the angelic wings of a now-dead baby chick. This is a pretty picture for how the book sees heaven interwoven throughout earth. Angels surface throughout, and heaven keeps manifesting on earth despite the rot of grief and bulging kitchen garbage bags—or, perhaps, because of it.
Standout poems include “I Caught an Elk Chewing,” where Larsen perfectly captures the moment of transcendence that happens when you step into a wild space—“hello mystery, / hello hallelujah and kingdom come.” The poet “will speak nothing but elk all day” and at night “will dream her anew.”
The collection casts a similar sense of awe over me, a feeling of dream walking through Larsen’s everyday life. If I am wandering through his mind in “Triage,” I start doing his household chores in “After Reading Song of Songs, I Take Out the Garbage.” I’ll never look at empty yogurt cups the same way again.
A personal favorite poem was “Is Any Morning Sky Getting In?”, a hazy-feeling poem that tumbles the reader through young summer love. Larsen’s return to lineated verse is in full display in one long, kiss-riddled sentence that, like the rest of these poems, plays with breaks and punctuation. Of course, the piece and its titular question also probe the profound emotions of the collection: deep grief, wild love, and the divinity of what is ultimately sensual.
Larsen’s love and grief are painted through earthly images you can reach out and touch. In “After the Miscarriage,” he talks of “the braille and breath of what if,” and in “Widow Water,” its widow “eats / a pomegranate, jewel by bleeding jewel.” And I will never shake the image of an ownerless puppy in “Baedeker,” where a Roma girl “pours a shiny whelp into my hands.”
If the book is brought to life by Larsen’s tactile details, then, for a reader of faith, it is bound together by a holy reverence. Latter-day Saints will find God in the familiar scenes of “Blessing the Sacrament in My In-laws’ Garage” or “The Bread and Water of It,” but He’s also found in emergency rooms, funeral arrangements, and toasters throughout.
If I could capture the collection in just one image, it would be this one, from “Let There Be Birds”: “If there’s a god blessing / this mess, picture a five-year-old holding / a crayon who says let there be birds, let there be / bliss, then adds curlicues of sun to a puffing lake.”
Making a Kingdom of It is probably the best poetry to come from one of our greatest poets, and absolutely worth a read. It offers the perfect prescription for fresh eyes to see heaven right in the now.
HANNAH LENNING {hannah.lenning@