Fast-paced, imaginative, weird, interesting, and fresh, Book of Potions by Lauren K. Watel is filled with dreams but delivers real emotion. This book of prose poems examines the contrast between external/surface self and reality, building its own world through irrealism. The poems often read as allegory, with a fair amount of absurdity. The book’s central questioning circles what we can know about someone else.

Early in Book of Potions, we are introduced to the concept of façade. In the poem “No Introductions Needed” the speaker begins at the surface:

No introductions needed, just state my name. Well, if you insist on a few words, say I’m middle-aged, which you can see for yourself. My hair, my skin, a map of experiments […] (p. 8)

However, as the poem continues, we get to the inner life of the speaker:

And as I accomplished very little over a half century of wandering these sidewalks, you can skip my accomplishments and say that I’m tough and mean. Say that I’m harsh, to put the audience at ease, and that as a girl I learned riflery and archery and gymnastics and nature, so I could survive in the wilderness for a day, maybe two. (p. 8)

The poem continues in this vein, getting more personal and more absurd, with touches of humor. In that way, this poem is a model of the book as a whole. Similarly, the poem “In the Portrait Gallery” describes a gallery exhibit opening party where all the portraits are of people the speaker knows:

They look overly serious, trapped, as if they’d been captured on the canvas against their will, as if they’d been forced. Which brings me to the fact that I can’t remember the painter. The show opened just this evening, but no one seems to know the artist’s name, not even the people who work here. What is this gallery, anyway? I’ve never seen it advertised. (p. 12)

The poem reduces everyone the speaker knows to portraits, to only surface. A later poem, “That Summer,” describes a dream boyfriend that no human could match, a façade of a man. And the poem “When It Hits You” describes a literal façade:

When it hits you that your face is missing, peeled back from your skull-front like a lavish window display lifted from a fancy shop, you can do nothing; it’s already long gone. And you weren’t even aware of the loss, because your face disappeared while you were distracted, admiring the scenery. (p. 35)

The face has been stolen while the speaker is distracted. It’s an absurd and simple set-up, which, as is typical in this book, leads to something deeper:

… when it hits you anew, that your face has been taken, that your sadness has been taken, your longing and regret, your shame, your youth, your sense of your own beauty, your pride—all taken, all peeled away. Who could have done this to you? (p. 35)

The surface, the façade, is in some ways the truth, or an important part of it. The poem brings it home with the ending:

You walk around faceless, clutching your jawbones, your cheekbones, with a tender vigilance, because you need bones to face whatever’s coming, you need something hard to absorb the impact of the next blow. (p. 35)

Another important theme in this collection is family, the most intimate, closest society the author fits within. The speaker’s family seems to be a cold and dysfunctional backdrop, as we can see further into the poem “No Intros Needed”:

Say that I’m disapproving and critical, qualities I came by honestly, which you’d discover if you met my mother. And susceptible to gloom, to a relentless-yet-useless self-scrutiny, which often devolves to dire universalizing, which often devolves to a down-turning spiral of bleakness from which there is diminishing chance of escape. Qualities I also came by honestly, which you’d discover if you met my father. (p. 8)

Similarly, the poem “Someday I Must Tell” starts as a story about a failed relationship, with the dream-like addition of glittering gowns and tuxes, but pivots to strange halfway through:

And the ring on my finger, that huge improbably diamond my mother gave to you to give to me. When after nine months you didn’t, she took it back, had it reappraised and gave it to me herself. Does that mean I’m technically promised to my mother? Maybe, but what’s so strange about that? We were always promised, my mother and I, an unholy couple, like most mothers and daughters. Maybe you knew. Maybe that’s why you put the ring in the top drawer of your dresser, along with your passport and the medal your father won. Maybe you knew if you gave me the ring, you would have to be my mother. (p. 36)

The poem speaks about generational patterns—don’t we all recreate the dynamics of the family we grew up in?—and of the strain that any dysfunction can put on romantic relationships.

Which brings us to the white room. The collection contains three poems titled “In the White Room,” and in the first of these the room is described as a blank, empty and menacing space:

In the white room with its white shutters, its white sheets, its white shadows, all the hissing and roaring, all the dreams and the doors—are they locked? (p. 20)

The next poem in the series continues to increase the tension and foreboding:

Why am I lying here, bent nearly in half? What am I afraid of? It’s an ordinary day, as far as I know, but the sun looks inflamed behind the shutters. (p. 38)

The poem ends with the image of the shutters “spattered in white.” The final poem of the series explains the white room, and the connection to family legacy:

My hands clutch this notebook as if it were the hands of my father, dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He was in a white room of his own. Or was it night in there? Hard to tell, his eyes were so opaque. (p. 59)

The speaker of these poems examines self and family with humor and absurdity, often at the surface level but with an odd distance and by using dream-like imagery; but she deals with devastating truths of identity and family trauma.

The poems in this collection also deal with another layer of trauma visited upon the speaker, and many of her readers—the expectations of women in society. Expanding out from the family, but with similar absurd and dream-like set-ups, many of the poems in the book reflect on the experience of being a woman. Take, for example, the beginning of the poem “They Brought Her In”:

They brought her in to sit in the audience. They brought her in to listen. They brought her in to look pretty and keep her mouth shut. They brought her in to laugh at the right times. They brought her in to pour the wine and eat the crumbs. Do they want her opinion? Do they want her story? Heavens no, they want her to keep her opinions and stories to herself. Or, better yet, not to have any … (p. 6)

Or this example from “The Kings”:

They kings are going blind. The kings are going deaf. The kings are going fat and simple. All day long they eat and drink and sit on their thrones, their joints stiffening. Their subjects smile and flatter them, and the kings believe the flattery, though they should know better. And the queens? Long ago the queens adored the kings, but as the kings saw and heard less and less, the queens saw and heard more and more. Nowadays they walk the castle walls and stare out to sea at the ships approaching from the horizon, the queens ready to leave as soon as the right ship makes harbor … (p. 11)

The woman speaker of these poems has tired of the rules of society and the experience of being a well-behaved woman. She is disgruntled, perhaps a bit bored. In the poem “Must She Always” the speaker is similarly weary of the role she must play in her relations:

Must she always have to beg? Of course, she must. He prefers her small, so she begs. But she’s grown tired of it, grown tired of the pleading, tired of diminishing, and she longs to stop. It was always just an act anyway … (p. 40)

We’re back to the idea of façade: how we look and act certain ways on the surface that are not what is true for our center.

The poems in Book of Potions use humor and bizarre situations to expose how we put on masks and roles in polite society, and how these masks become trite over a lifetime. Watel’s voice is never preachy in delivering this message. In fact, I laughed many times reading these poems. But the lasting emotional impact is one of empathy to inherited pain and trauma, and to the stuckness the speaker expresses in these poems. Watel hands us a funhouse mirror, or a comic social media filter—the image we see is funny and distorted, but we can still see where our mascara is smeared from crying, and hopefully we can see enough to fix it up a bit.