What does it mean to live through a disaster? How do the circumstances leading to a disaster trace through the actual event, and beyond. Coloring the consequences so they feel even more disastrous? When you first start to read Steffan Triplett’s book, Bad Forecast, you might be lured into focusing entirely on the tornado that hit Joplin, MO in 2011. It was a disaster. You can look it up on Wikipedia and find the numbers associated with it. There was billions of dollars in damage; the tornado destroyed thousands of homes. But whatever this record indicates, it’s actually just numbers. A fact-based description of a natural disaster is only going to be cursory in nature.
You could say Triplett’s book revolves around two specific facts: He lived, and his closest friend did not. There’s a lot that happened that day, and in that context these two facts might be barely relevant. But that’s the nature of disaster. US culture focuses on quantifying damages. It gauges the scope of a disaster on whatever numbers might report.
But there is a depth to disaster that dwells in the personal. It’s a rhythm the disaster uses to play through the body. It’s a portioning, as Triplett reveals in Bad Forecast. Like a tornado doesn’t just arrive, it comes in stages. The best friend of his who died, their friendship came in stages. The stage of their friendship, for instance, where Triplett came out to him during an overnight. His friend wasn’t gay, but he understood. And that sets a tone for this friendship. One stage of the disaster is Triplett living a queer boyhood in Joplin, MO. As you might imagine, there’s a disaster connected to that. His friend’s acceptance had helped to mitigate that disaster. But when his friend was killed by the tornado, the tornado becomes a much bigger disaster for him.
And that’s the complication of this book. The tornado is a disaster. But what leads up to the tornado speaks to the scope of Triplett’s experience of the tornado. There’s the stage where the idea of home feels very complicated. How can Triplett be from somewhere that can barely accept who he is? And it’s the reach of disaster where I find the richest reading. The book’s account of the tornado uses image, mythos, and docupoetics to describe the extent of the natural disaster. In “Butterfly People,” Triplett relates a grade school project involving a pale of monarch butterflies to the “butterfly people” who had been swept up into the storm. The poems complicate a survivor’s guilt of living through all of this. In a linear reading, Bad Forecast complicates the radiating consequences of tragedy. Can there be an origin point of tragedy?
Yes, it’s said Triplett’s friend was reciting the Lord’s Prayer as the twister pulled his body out of the car. A child was said to have asked if the bodies flying up into the tornado were angels. The tragic nature of natural disasters is all the normal life that was abruptly ended. Triplett would count the life of his friend as one of the casualties, but how does quantifying that loss fathom what it felt like to him?
Tracing tragedy to its origin is almost like trying to map out a horizon line. You might get yourself close, but the closer you get, the more you realize a precise location is futile. Triplett’s book traces back into his friendship, maybe to elaborate on what makes losing his friend so painful. But the further he goes back, the more the poems are absorbed in what it’s like living a queer life in Joplin, MO. Like maybe the real disaster involves living as anything but a White man in rural America? Like the book was piecing this all together the whole time, the way Triplett pieces together one of the final poems in the book, “The Mole.”
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.