I Woke a Lake

I Woke a Lake faces the anxieties of climate change, extinctions, and political chaos. Susan McCabe weaves together the fragile fabric of worlds imagined and lost, both palpable and present. Poised between reveries and ruins, the book traverses several layers: the Ice Age; the excavation of the oldest female body; ancient Los Angeles before humans; and, in Sweden (McCabe’s mother’s home country), the 377-million-year-old meteor-made Siljan lake, in conversation with the oldest tree alive. These channeled non-human voices, both whimsical and uncanny, animate more recent landscapes--such as Dalarna’s nearby seventeenth-century copper mine, now closed, along with a fantastical modern ice hotel in a state of meltdown. The landmarks of loss are sometimes dizzy-making as McCabe celebrates her childhood pantheism and queer development in West Hollywood, mourns dead relatives and lost habitats, and confronts her masculine lineage, blotted out through grief, addiction, and war. I Woke a Lake holds up an invisible telephone connecting recurrent locales, among them, blasted orchards, the Veterans’ Cemetery, Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood home in Great Village, grieving parties, and a cryopreservation site. These different layers reverberate with each other, taking on a haunted and haunting music, reaching toward an otherworldly, tender overhearing.

Susan McCabe is a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, teaching poetics, modernism, ecology, and creative writing. She is the author of two books of poetry, Swirl, a Lambda Literary finalist, and Descartes’ Nightmare; two critical books, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, and Cinematic Modernism; and a dual bi-biography, H.D & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism. Her poetry reviews have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, and Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere.