Lessons in Drawing Closer
Rachel Hicks’s poetry shows the powerful role words play in bridging the gap between everyday experience and the divine.
Review by Elise Tegegne
Accumulated Lessons in Displacement, Rachel E. Hicks’s debut poetry collection, gives voice to the “bright sadness” and “bitter joy” of sojourns both spatial and spiritual. Drawing from her years as a global nomad and her journey of faith in Christ, Hicks explores the emotional terrain of experiences like losing electricity in the Himalayan foothills, pranking her ayah in Old Delhi, and exchanging adolescent kisses on a rooftop in Amman—all remembered from her current perch in Baltimore. Through these particularities, Hicks illumines the broader reality of human life as a pilgrimage on this planet, and our longing to find expression for the ineffable through connection with others.
This yearning to connect is seen perhaps most directly in “Everything Is a Departure,” where Hicks evokes images of separation in the aftermath of a meal between two people at a restaurant. The narrator’s opening words descend into a void, receiving no response: “You’re closing the magazine; / I’m calculating / the tip.” The poem continues with images of disconnected phone lines, monarchs leaving for the warm south, a city silently sinking into the sea. The sense of isolation is heightened through modern usage of the technology that mediates much of human interaction through screens and clouds. Nostalgic for the days of landline telephones, the narrator says, “Today I longed to speak to an operator / whose fingers would connect // my vocal vibrations to someone / who was waiting for them.” In an age where connection is often disembodied, Hicks expresses a longing for a specifically tangible intimacy.
Words are one of the tools Hicks finds to create these longed-for connections. She expresses a fascination with the powers and limitations of words, at one point dedicating a whole poem to a meditation on the word “cusp.” Hicks even employs the occasional non-English word to express precise meaning lost in translation. The poem “Kou 口,” meaning “mouth” (Hicks has a fascination for mouths, often referencing them in her poems), closes with the common Mandarin Chinese question “Ji kou ren / literal translation: // How many mouth-people / your household?”, evoking with startling poignancy the suffering of those who hunger. By employing a non-English word, Hicks uncovers another dimension of what it means to be human, finding in another language a strange but somehow familiar articulation of one of our own deepest needs.
Many of Hicks’s poems unfold between two people finding connection through vocalized words. She shows how the enfleshed act of speech, the exchange of sound vibrations between two bodies, ties people together in a close, united physical space. The narrator in “Come Kneel,” asks for her friend to uphold her through prayer: “Tonight I need the prayer that you would pray,” while the narrator in “It Wasn’t Odd” cradles her elderly neighbor who “sought me out” saying “I’m dying … It’s coming now, baby.” Sometimes even mispronounced words can form intimate bonds. In “You Kept Trying to Say Butter,” the narrator says to her friend, “But I couldn’t / understand you.” Though the friends share an intimate moment of wordless laughter, the narrator wishes “we could speak / together // easy in your / mother tongue.”
In addition to conversing with others, sometimes the narrator engages in dialogue with saints—and even Christ. Using unexpected imagery conjured by evocative language, Hicks weaves a bridge of intimacy connecting readers to the “great cloud of witnesses” and the One for Whom they lived and died. “You despise every offering that doesn’t come broken. / We hate to come empty-handed. // (Nobody could make this stuff up.)” In Hicks’s honest, human portraits of the saints, we are given the gift of seeing them anew. Through the eyes of Mary and Joseph’s neighbor, the reader experiences the slaughter of little boys younger than two after Jesus’s birth (“Then in the pregnant dark, / a chuckling softly at a mule: Joseph from next door—”), the ambivalence of Job’s later years (“Yet the skin around these scars / pulls and itches, flares red;”), and the often unacknowledged bitterness of Joseph’s exile (“Yet what if you are not the favored son, but one who woke / from dreams, number twelve in line for your father’s attentions,”). By offering real-world, gritty context, Hicks breathes oft-told Bible stories into visceral, discomfiting life.
The work is a wrestling with words, a wrestling like Jacob with the angel, to express the inexpressible sorrows and joys of being a pilgrim on this planet.
Throughout her poems, Hicks gives a voice not only to herself as a global nomad, but to those who often suffer in silence. The reader hears the first-person stories of a depressed person (“Depression, Annotated”), a raped woman (“The Truth about the River”), and a woman who dies in a tsunami (“The Hill About Minamisanriku”). In one of her most heart-rending poems, Hicks draws the reader’s attention to a newborn girl in India who was drowned shortly after birth for being female. The mother “trembles, foresees // how rivers will run dry / and dust choke and strangle // the mechanisms of the turning world / because of the disappeared.” Hicks highlights how even a silent death can jar the wheels of the world. When we do not attend to the voices of all God’s creatures, even those of the magnificent cicadas in “Cicadas, East of Eden,” we fail “utterly / at our original vocation.”
In her work’s title poem, one of Hicks’s narrators shows how the inability to vocalize trauma silences and isolates the displaced. “I was unable to speak for many days. / Natural expressions, gestures—I lost this language. // No one understood, perhaps not even my wife.” Yet Hicks also acknowledges how the absence of words can be fertile soil for growth. The narrator continues, “I let silence have its way: germination was occurring.”
Though vocalized words open doors to connection, some silences can open space for a different kind of intimacy—one beyond words. The narrator revels in the introversion of November, how the low clouds stop her words “like gauze in my mouth.” And in “Melancholy,” Hicks references the Book of Revelation, writing of “the hand of silence cupping me” as she longs for the city where there is no pain or sorrow or death. These meditations allow Hicks to explore the possibility that, though words can be doors to intimacy, they can sometimes become barriers. In “The Morning After Freddie Gray’s Funeral,” the narrator recalls her perplexity in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death and the acquittal of the six officers at whose hands he suffered fatal injuries. “My words failed: yes, but—and not that simple. / I have no ready language for this—”. The harsh angles of the em-dashes breaking up her words express her inability to vocalize a response to tragedy. She settles for making mint tea to give to her Black neighbors, finding an image of redemption in the steeping tea: “In the kitchen, mint and black tea leaves / mingle, staining the clear water / irrevocably, which, at least, seems right.”
Hicks’s poetry seeks to alchemize the raw material of her nomadic experiences into meaning. The work is a wrestling with words, a wrestling like Jacob with the angel, to express the inexpressible sorrows and joys of being a pilgrim on this planet. Words, particularly those exchanged in conversation, become the nexus of the spiritual and embodied. In this beautiful collection, Hicks’s poems recall not only the incarnation of thought into word, but the mystery of a God enfleshed into the eternal Word: “the Voice,” calling out to sojourners in reverberations of ineffable love.
Elise Tegegne is a writer and editor. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University, and her work has appeared in Plough, Ekstasis by Christianity Today, The Windhover, and Fathom, among others. Her new release In Praise of Houseflies: Meditations on the Gifts in Everyday Quandaries (Calla Press, 2025) is now available wherever books are sold. She taught French in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and now lives stateside. Connect with her on social media or her website.
Accumulated Lessons in Displacement was published by Wipf and Stock Publishers on June 30, 2025. Fare Forward appreciates the provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy here.
