[Sarabande Books; 2025]
Lauren K. Watel’s debut collection, Book of Potions begins by defining a new literary form: “potion = poem + fiction.” The definition is a clue about how to read the book. By calling her writings “potions,” the author is hinting at the family resemblance between literary and alchemical admixtures, namely that both can effect magic through certain metabolic processes. The raw ingredients, brewing methods, and consumption protocols vary, of course. An alchemical potion may contain willow leaves or mandrake root or ground-down wolf’s tooth and must be stirred in a cauldron or a mortar-and-pestle before being administered through the recipient’s mouth. Its varieties are poisons, elixirs, psychedelics, and the like, the purposes of which may be killing, curing, sending on a trip, and so on. Watel’s literary potions, by contrast, mix sung metaphors with truth-bearing falsehoods and must be written down before being administered through the listener’s ear. Their varieties are dreams, parables, hypnoses, and other incantations, the purposes of which may be imagining, ironizing, judging, and so forth. Alchemy and writing are most comparable in the power of their effects. Just as the philter may alter the mind in addition to physical matter (e.g., Puck’s flower extract that causes Titania to fall in love with Bottom), so may the poetized fiction alter physical matter (e.g., releasing rage from the diaphragm like carbonation from a bursting bottle). Moreover, just as the ancient alchemist plays perilously with the elements, transmuting nickel into gold or coldness into love, so Watel tarries hazardously with the black magic of words, turning meanings into ambiguities, banal facts into allegorical truths. Her Book of Potions aspires to nothing less than verbal sorcery.
If poetry concentrates attention, and fiction diffuses it, then Watel’s potion somehow does both at the same time. “We’re Marching” tells of an army of people walking out to sea “in eerie unison,” keeping tight formation as they traverse wastelands and forests en route to the open horizon. The journey to the sea feels long, as if we were marching every step with the army and calluses were forming on our feet; yet the telling takes less than a paperback page. Watel achieves this phenomenological distortion by combining musical lyrics and extended sentence structures with a Homeric plot. When magnitudes of meaning gather into very small fragments, the reader’s sense of time starts to drag, concentrating and diffusing our attention at once. The first line of “Sent in the Mail” is a sentence fragment that captures the sensation of a boat pushing off from port and drifting wave upon wave: “Sent in the mail, my heart in a paper cage, sent over the ocean in a steamer.” Then, we follow the letter over the ocean, through various ports and trains and horses and walking postmen, sharing the author’s exhausted relief when it finally reaches its destination in the far-flung countryside of a far-flung country. To cover this great distance slowly, and to capture the letter writer’s undulating expectations, requires less than a page.
Watel often directs her literary sorcery toward the self-defensive psyche that lives inside of all of us, her potions shocking us awake to our own narcissisms. One titled “In the Portrait Gallery” shows how this works. The narrator has gone alone to an art opening at a posh gallery that serves champagne to the guests as they view the artworks. Her aloneness makes her uneasy (she could not get anyone to come to the opening with her), and she soon realizes that all of the portraits in the gallery are likenesses of people she knows: lovers, friends, old schoolmates, even a “would-have-been stepson.” She finds the situation unnerving—why are all her associates trapped in frames, and she alone?—and yet reassuring, for she notices that she knows many attractive people, each of their faces “a drama of complex expressiveness, a portraitist’s dream.” Her reassurance fades, however, as soon as she begins to wonder who the painter is. When no one at the gallery can tell her, she senses that her champagne has gone flat, and she looks for the exit. Another potion, “Martyrs, All of Us,” discloses this same dark narcissism from a different angle. It describes a world of people—people like you and me—who perform martyrdom for public audiences, sacrificing conspicuously for their holy causes, whatever those happen to be. These self-denying saints shimmer with a heavenly light that overwhelms their admirers. So filled with the spirit are they that their lives seem stuffed with enviable mystical experiences: “We speak to each other in tongues unintelligible. We lay healing hands upon each other’s blindnesses. We fall down in flashes of divine incomprehension. We all rise healed of our sinfulness.” In private, however, the martyrs are mean and miserly egoists who yell at their children and curse at their spouses, their personalities embrittled by the weight of their holiness. Like Flannery O’Connor’s religious parables of divine violence, Watel’s potions cure with a killing mercy, exposing the unredeemed parts of ourselves that we would have to overcome in order to be free.
The potions open our eyes, as well, to our unhealed alienations from the world. “The Exile” is a parable about a quiet old man who raises his voice at the dinner table only to speak about his former country, the beloved and godforsaken place that he had to leave, whose language he loves and still speaks to himself but whose memory he stores as a “deadened rage” in his gut. The narrator says that he has an “unreliable heart,” a double-edged descriptor of his decaying body and his unsteady convictions, for he has lived a long life in a foreign land in which he is not completely at home. The thought of his imminent death creeps up on him and makes him irascible, adding a sharp edge to all of his words: “[His] pride makes him cruel. As does his fear, which is all over him, worse than a shadow, worse than an odor, more like a thought that can’t be repressed, a thought stuck in the mind…” The old man makes jokes at his dinner companions’ expense, ribbing and diminishing them, until finally, he rises, wobbling unsteadily, from the table, realizing that he is next bound for the last country he will visit, the one where all the inhabitants are silent. This uncanny experience of feeling divided against oneself and unknown in any world recurs throughout the book. Like Franz Kafka’s frozen personages, so many of Watel’s figures live out their lives without self-insight and among people with whom they enjoy no discernible solidarities.
Watel’s potions are not only psychological but sociological. Numerous pieces in the collection transmute basic social facts into rich philosophical allegories. “Enjoy the Mayhem” is an ironic celebration: the authorities have returned to town to settle the mayhem overtaking the streets—bars of revelers, city parks reeking of piss, public schools pocked with bullet holes, etc. Instead of “fights and fires breaking out in flash after glorious flash,” there will be “more police, more riot gear, more lawyers, more prisons, more judges, more arrests”—a world in which children no longer have to worry about growing up (because the adults have taken care of it for them). In this same genre is “The Jails,” a mind-bending potion that foretells a revolution. The narrator, asking how the jails got full of prisoners, enters a circuitous historical path to the last epoch in which the jails were full. (Spoiler: revolution erupted.) There are a half-dozen more potions like these—“Blame No One,” “Bombs Away,” and “The Apocalypse Is Now” among them—that seek to dispel the governing delusions of contemporary American life. The literary form of the potion itself is always integral to their messages. What makes the scales fall from our eyes is the realization that our actuality is in fact the allegory (not the other way around), and that we live through the described horrors unmediated.
Lauren K. Watel’s Book of Potions is devoted first and foremost to the literary form in which it conveys its strange magic. Even the physical book itself plays tricks: the slim spine and featherlight pages conceal its overall verbal density. In this regard, the potions may be like Jorge Luis Borges’s alchemical “fictions”: finite portals into language’s infinite recursive worlds.
Kelly M.S. Swope is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Thomas More University in Covington, Kentucky, where he teaches social and political philosophy.
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