Every elegy, in some sense, attempts to achieve a preservation of the Mourned through an immortality of one sort or another—the writing itself becoming a phylactery, another way for the Mourned's memory to live on indefinitely. It can be said if a poem is a house, the elegy is a mausoleum, a physical manifestation of honor and grief intertwined and moving through interior spaces. In Alison Thumel's Architect we see the mausoleum for its building materials as well as its finished build. We see an elegy through its construction. We see the scaffolding, the concrete foundation, the various pieces folding into a whole.
     The first poem, "Prairie Style,"begins in a past before the loss, before any architecture was thought of or needed, reflecting in a concise lyrical mode: "Inside a memory / is its ruin. / Inside ruin, what?", with these lines gesturing outward, forward, backward—we are left with a sense of what will be built, what there is to be found in ruin, the act of giving way or falling down. Can anything made for the dead be anything more than a ruin in which the dead remain? The mausoleum, well kept, can feel ruinous.
     Through a keen lens focused on a series of prose poems surrounding an architecture class on Frank Lloyd Wright, we experience a coming to grips with the loss of a sibling. These prose poems are found throughout Architect, resembling building blocks, each an unearthing of vital history. These poems ground us securely in their directness, introducing and informing a contextual foundation upon which the book is erected: "My brother was born in Oak Park, Illinois, not far from [Frank Lloyd] Wright's home and studio. Three weeks before he died, he and I watched bats taking off from beneath a bridge."
     Form is something Thumel is acutely aware of in both shape and constraint. The sonnet and sestina forms are used expertly—I especially enjoyed "Whirling Arrow," a poem towards the end of the book which deftly uses the sestina form to encapsulate the cyclical nature of memory and grief, how it is returned to, and recurs, time and time again. In other poems like "sistering," a term for reinforcing an old beam with a new one, the title becomes a scaffold upon which lines are formed: spaced apart and facing one another with a clear space between, like joists supporting an unseen floor—here, the unsaid takes on a nearly physical manifestation. Is a house a house without a roof?
     Thumel ruminates on how, and whether, change changes us through an examination of the Ship of Theseus, a paradox which asks whether a ship which has had all its constituent parts replaced is still the same ship. Who are we when we are left existing with an integral piece of us missing? "But as I said, I knew the ship before I knew the myth." Thumel writes. The speaker sees that everything is constantly changing, knows it is, but continues holding, in the other hand, what was, memory, and does not want it changed. The paradox inherent in grief.
     Thumel's writing cleaves, in both senses, the oscillating emotions unearthed in the process of grief, without telling us how one should grieve, and, through this open-house showing, we are brought into the precise and expansive work Thumel has created. Once a house is built, what else is one to do but to live, whether within or without it.