Iguana Iguana

Reading Caylin Capra-Thomas’s Iguana Iguana I felt, at times, as if Virginia Woolf were reaching into the gold and copper and rusting trucks of an Americana landscape where a self is seen “bursting into being in spring like flies or pines / or mushrooms. Still nervous as a ghost, throat / filled with smoke.” Observations unfold in stream of consciousness like unseen fungal networks, connecting the many dead versions of a main speaker who instructs their disparate selves to notice how the “obscure chorus of your own life / keeps cawing into the diamond dark, under the roaring / of each body you inhabit.”

Iguana Iguana foregrounds a lyrical search for self-knowledge, while drawing on the second person address to pull the reader close. Capra-Thomas’s power of observation bends reality for a speaker who likes “to sit and watch things rot. Twin / sunflowers in an empty bourbon bottle, // fuzzy mold turtlenecking their stems.” Elsewhere, a speaker contemplates how “[i]n close-ups, I think the sun’s surface looks like / a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto.”

Mining the psychological and philosophical potential of each little moment is where this collection really shines. In “Patron Saints,” the emptiness experienced when the speaker returns to their hometown takes on cosmic proportions as a passing car appears to resemble its namesake planet:

[…] I saw nothing 
but late winter’s gold lick the forsaken trees
and some schoolmates tool by in an old Saturn
ringed around the rims with snow […]

Observing “[e]veryone there waiting for something / that would never return,” the speaker soon realizes that “whatever I was waiting for lived / somewhere else and I was never coming back.”