A Review of Boyer Rickel’s Morgan (a Lyric) — May 4, 2022 by Christopher Nelson
In January, 2012, poet and publisher Morgan Lucas Schuldt died following a double-lung transplant after years of living with cystic fibrosis. Boyer Rickel, his partner, writes with breathtaking candor and insight about love and the challenges and terrors of terminal illness in Morgan (a Lyric), whichwon the 2020 Gold Line Press Nonfiction Chapbook Competition. Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, who selected Rickel’s manuscript, describes the work as “one long breath, an inhale and exhale as an offering to his lover whose lungs were failing.”
For years Rickel’s preferred form has been the sentence, and his books and chapbooks of recent years—remanence, Tempo Rubato, and now Morgan (a Lyric)—resist easy categorization. Essay, lyrical prose, poetry, hybridity—regardless of how we classify it, his new work is rich with poetry’s musicality, figurative potency, and allusive reach. Woven throughout this non-linear memoir are excerpts from Book 16 of The Iliad, which describe Patroclus’s battles, victims, and his death. Spliced into the context of Morgan’s illness, lines like “tore his chest left bare by the shield-rim, / loosed his knees and the man went crashing down” render the monotony of disease and hospitalization into the mythic, which is what the loss of the beloved is, a mythic experience in which the mind and heart are subjected to a gravity greater than the ordinary, the pull of which one never forgets and perhaps never escapes. One of Rickel’s remarkable accomplishments in Morgan (a Lyric) is to not only make the reader feel that gravity but to temper its devastating effects with beauty, humor, and compassion. We are in the rooms with them—in the hospital (3 Northeast), the coffee shop at Time Market, the bedroom, the ICU—listening to their jokes, their whispers, and their candid fears. “Why do you do this? he asked. Why do you take care of me? // I’ve never been the hero, I said. I don’t want to be the hero. I’m the hero’s sidekick.”
With an economy of words, Rickel’s poignant vignettes transport us from scenes of intimacy to clinical formality. The surgeon says that “86% of our double-lung transplant patients are alive after a year; 60% after three,” and we are with them during the therapy routine that structured their lives, the long sessions of pounding back and chest to loosen phlegm, four times a day. Rickel shifts scenes with ease and lucidity, the narrative a mosaic, not a timeline, each page giving us more bright pieces that, by the end, make a complete and compelling picture of love playing out against a formidable adversary: time. “My breathable hourglass,” Morgan says as he slips his oxygen tank into his backpack after iced lattes.
Contributing to the mosaic, pages-worth of decontextualized quotations are inlaid throughout, heightening the meditation on themes of love, loss, mind, body, and art. In eternity, there’s no distinction of tenses (Sir Thomas Brown); Consciousness: just one form of matter’s mischief (Diane Ackerman). This pastiche is a style Rickel uses (and used in remanence) to great effect. Because of it, Morgan (a Lyric) has the nearness and insularity of a diary while also engaging some of the great minds of literature—Beckett, Proust, Valèry, Maso, Musil. In an interview I had with Rickel some years ago, he said this of his style: “I think it’s possible for the imagination—and the heart—to make meaningful connections out of more far-ranging material than we often challenge it to do.”
Mosaic is one apt metaphor for Morgan (a Lyric), but so is tapestry. I can’t recall a recent book so tightly and hypnotically woven. Images and entire sentences recur throughout, but in each recurrence the context is new and so is their meaning and impact. On the first page, Morgan says that anger has motivated him his entire life. It follows a violent image from The Iliad of a spear being ripped from a midriff. Anger is an understandable response to a life fated to be short. Later, however, we learn that Morgan is Rickel’s lover—and that Morgan isn’t “out” and that Rickel is older and sometimes mistaken for Morgan’s father. Then anger’s significance deepens—its threads connecting several situations and ideas—: it is a response not only to an illness Morgan did nothing to earn but to the constraints and judgments the social order imposes on our identities.
While long for a chapbook, Morgan (a Lyric) can still be read in a sitting, and one experiences a depth of feeling and thinking you would expect from a 400-page novel. In this sense it is poetry par excellence: language molded and compressed into a concentrate of ideas and emotion. And yet, as I write about Rickel’s stylistic choices, allusions, and metaphors, I feel that I’m betraying the greatest accomplishment of this book: Rickel bravely stands before us, bared beyond the skin, showing himself and his lover at their weakest, most vulnerable time. Morgan (a Lyric) is, above all, a work of exceptional courage and love, a testament to the heroic capacities for strength and compassion inherent in us all.
