Reviewed:

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Blowdown

by Jessica L. Walsh 

Small Harbor Publishing, 2026, 84 pp., $18.00

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Despite being ubiquitous in California, eucalyptus trees aren’t endemic to the area. They were imported from Australia in the 1800s, when wood was in high demand, because they grow tall and fast, even in nutrient-lacking soil. And today they’re considered moderately invasive. You hear more about them when the weather turns irregular; they pose a fire risk in high temperatures, and their shallow roots make them especially prone to falling in high winds. In 2023, a single storm downed almost 40 100-foot eucalyptus in San Diego alone. Left in its wake was both an apparent blowdown—an instance in which trees have been or are being, quite literally, blown down by wind—and a more subtle tale of examining a questionable history.

Like the eucalyptus, Jessica L. Walsh isn’t from California either, but she knows what it means to excavate the past. Her most recent collection of poems, aptly titled Blowdown, is equally rich in the symbolism of digging up the origin of our inheritances. Walsh mines the depths of her own family tree, tears at its roots, and deftly sorts through the destruction, all the while acknowledging that it takes a lot of stress for a tree to topple. Despite being an act of nature, a blowdown is almost unnatural. Trees are built to withstand a good bit of battering and still survive. So, it seems, are some people. 

While Blowdown confronts a good bit of familial trauma, with mentions of violence and neglect, underneath it all lies a current of endurance and unmet potential. A series of furniture—yes, furniture—in the first poem alludes to the idea of heirlooms one might pass down. These, in particular, are all made of wood: “A wardrobe in an unused room, / or belly of a roll-top desk. // Cedar hope chest in a cellar.” And all take shape as empty containers—a series of things someone made that have yet to fulfill their purpose. Though unclear who exactly, the speaker aligns themselves with this image of feeling unproductive or unsuccessful: “Five decades in plain sight / and what do I have to show for surviving.” 

It’s a bold question to pose so early on, but one many of us are guilty of asking, especially as we age. Somewhat ironically, the collection has the capacity to serve as the answer, even if the speaker never addresses the thought again; the poems ultimately exist as a kind of family legacy, a proof of life. “So give me my accounting. / Pulp this family tree / and make of it a ledger” demands the second poem, where pulp doubles as reference to both the meat of a fruit borne of a tree and the ancient ingredient used to make paper. A paper trail, of sorts. A record in response to questions of personal history any number of people may grapple with: “What part of me was inevitable, / or was I always past the point. // I am asking: am I my own fault.” 

The question prods at a mystery, and even in its record-keeping, the collection maintains a good bit of obscurity. These complex questions come across as rhetorical, in part because they are followed by periods rather than question marks, as though the answer doesn’t matter. Either because the speaker may never know the answer, or because, perhaps, the speaker already knows. And since we’re rarely sure who the speaker is, the mystery is magnified. As a reader, it’s difficult to discern who embodies the I in any given poem; it could be any one of their ancestors. This way, Walsh throws us into the muck of the blowdown. After decades of trauma, what’s left for sure is a mess affecting everyone in striking distance. 

In the end, some of the only clues that back up this record as history lie in the titles themselves, which occasionally include locations, years, and/or a prevailing sentiment. The effect of this convention is one of thumbing through a family photo album, with names, dates, and places handwritten on the back. It invites a reader into a sitting room where they gaze upon these snapshots in time. One poem in particular, “The Silence,” includes an epigraph that describes the piece as “a cento from the journals of Marjorie Del Weldin Lane (1910-2006).” It’s the only poem with this added context, and the irony is that the complementing detail speaks volumes in contrast to another theme that permeates the collection: one of silence, of secrecy. 

We know from the notes that this poem is composed from journals belonging to Walsh’s grandmother, which she arranged to read: 

The sun came out this early evening 

and I thought of the silent space 

of fields and meadow 

all around their home. 

A rough recollection, 

a turbulent year— 

bleak—lonely—humiliating.

The cruel cut—

the awful silent finality—

the terrible power and grandeur of it—

those who were here and are now gone.

In other words: all that’s left after a blowdown is the quiet of the aftermath. The power of silence surfaces over and over again throughout the collection. And sometimes unabashedly, as in “When the Lake Gives Back,” where Walsh writes: “Our people die with their secrets / sealed in their mouths.” By vocalizing this unspoken truth, the poems in Blowdown resist the arguably unhealthy tradition of remaining tight-lipped. Walsh gives testimony to those who came before her and simultaneously builds a wayfinder for those who follow. 

Nowhere is her ambition clearer than in the poem Walsh dedicates to her daughter. In “11:11,” she writes, “If I can speak truth / into reality / that’s what I want / for you: // Change everything.” Of course, by making this proclamation, by documenting this offering, the speaker herself has already changed everything, even if she hasn’t recognized it. In each poem, Walsh allocates sound to silence, beauty to suffering, and purpose to existing, despite the fact that she treats existing itself as an exhausting endeavor.

All along, Walsh writes of the perpetual work to be done, of the way it hurts to be alive, of how hard it is just to survive. Not just for her, but for every person who came before her to collude in her being. By the end, the work hints at a passing of the proverbial torch, of accepting and letting go. In “Pyre,” she writes, “One day it will be the last fire of this season / and one day it will be the last fire / and I’ll be telling you I love you through the thin white smoke.” And maybe, Walsh seems to suggest, it’s the ability to express our feelings to one another in the midst of devastation that makes it all worthwhile.