Courtesy of LC English Department
In a moving and intimate final presentation through the Visiting Writers Series, Lewis & Clark alum Consuelo Wise ’09 returned to her alma mater to read from her debut hybrid collection, “boy.” Before a full house in Smith Hall, Wise’s reading and the rich Q&A that followed offered a deeply personal meditation on memory, grief and the delicate nature of love and loss.
The book-length poem “boy” is an elegy written in fragments, spiraling around the deaths of Wise’s two brothers. Her reading captured the room in a spell of soft repetition, brief stabs of clarity and beautiful lyricism. In her voice, the sparse language of her poems seemed to shimmer with tension — between absence and presence, memory and imagination.
During the Q&A portion of the event, Wise spoke candidly about the process of choosing the book’s cover image: a partial photograph of her younger brother, cropped to preserve ambiguity.
“It was his whole face,” Wise said. “But I didn’t want anyone to have a full image in their mind. I wanted them to have their own image.”
This artistic decision echoes the emotional shape of the book itself: elusive yet profoundly evocative.
Wise also addressed the emotional difficulty of writing through grief, noting how her process was shaped by silence and hesitation.
“It was hard to read, hard to think, hard to write,” Wise said. “So things became fragmented, partly because I had a difficult time speaking. But also, I revised into that.”
Her poetic form — clearly influenced by Sappho’s fragments, which she said she returned to during her grieving — became a fitting container for absence.
“I think one of the things with Sappho’s fragments is that even though we only have a piece, there’s a whole world around that one word,” Wise said, describing how she worked to amplify the energy between words and sometimes the space between them.
In terms of how she navigates what to share publicly and what to keep for herself, Wise is scared, but unapologetic.
“I’m most afraid of the people I grew up with reading it,” Wise said. “But if I thought too much about who I might hurt, I wouldn’t write any of it.”
She stressed that writing can begin in private, with no obligation to share.
“If you have the impulse, it’s important,” Wise said. “You don’t have to show anyone. But you won’t write if you’re too afraid.”
This reading held special significance for the LC community. Wise is an alum of the college, and several former professors and mentors were in attendance. “It’s so moving to see you again,” said professor of English, Pauls Toutonghi. Another recalled hearing Wise read poems at seventeen and recognizing “the same voice” in her adult work.
Throughout the discussion, Wise often returned to the idea of intuition — both trusting it and revising with it. One student asked whether she ever went against the advice or conventional wisdom to stay true to that instinct. Wise shared a moment from her revision process, where, despite confusion from readers, she preserved a disorienting passage about seeing her brother through a grate.
“I think it twisted my mind a little,” Wise said. “But I needed it to stay.”
Wise closed the night in gratitude, not only for the space to share “boy,” but for the opportunity to return to where her writing began. Her visit reminded the audience that poetry, especially in its most personal forms, often emerges from long silences, reassembling slowly from memory, longing and love.
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