I thought my life was over, and my heart
broken. Then I moved toward it,
and its beauty opened like a wound.
From Averno, Louise Glück
There are those many poems that describe the threshold between life and the dissolution of life, and there are those rare poems that are willing to stand in that threshold and sing.
Lise Goett’s “After a Dark Tunnel, Uplift, Lift,” the poem that opens her newest incandescent book from Tupelo Press, The Radiant, occupies precisely this charged aperture — a liminal vestibule where snow, spirit, and the mutinous body flicker in and out of correspondence. This is a poem of shimmering destabilization, yes, but also a poem of startling composure, the radiant poise one can only achieve when the body embraces itself as a temporary cathedral of light—of light on loan.
From the opening invocation — “Bliss,” spoken as if to a deity, a lover, a familiar spirit of the air — the poem begins not with narrative but with address, a direct appeal to a muse-like entity—one wants to say, “being,”—which dwells both inside and outside of the speaker.
“Bliss” is snow, is breath, is the shimmering particulate of winter, is the premonition of death and its strange, alluring sweetness. The poem situates us immediately in a world where categories blur: spirit becomes weather, weather becomes body, the body becomes updraft, a murmuration, a dream of dispersal.
And here, in this thickening drift, we begin to feel the tug of Kristeva’s abject: that which the body expels so that it may remain a body, and that which will, in the end, claim it.
The Snow as Specular Body, Or the Mirror God Intended
At the poem’s core is the specular image — the mirror-world where the dying body sees itself enlarged, ghosted, disbursing into shards of light:
Having seen the specular image
I wonder if this a dream,
whose dream is it—God’s or the tumors’—
Such doubling — the invisible made visible by forces both divine and pathological — is quintessentially Kristevan. Abjection arises when the boundaries of the self falter, give way; when the subject is seen by what it cannot control: the mother, the divine, the corpse, the disease.
In After a Dark Tunnel, Uplift, Lift this faltering is rendered not as spectacle but as atmosphere, as the subtle shift of pressure inside the body after it has passed through darkness. The poem begins in that liminal zone where the self has just survived its own unmaking, where shadow has not yet entirely relinquished its grip on the nerves. The tunnel is both literal and psychic: a passage through which the subject has been carried, scraped, reconfigured.
Here, abjection’s threshold is the moment of emergence. Light does not greet so much as startle the speaker. Brightness lifts, but with it rises the memory of what it clung to—
the residue of passage, the echo of the self that nearly didn’t.
The poem understands that the self that leaves the tunnel is not the self that entered it. The boundaries have been disturbed: vision has not fully recalibrated; the pulse still remembers the pitch of danger; the body is carrying the trace of something it cannot name without unraveling. This is abjection—not horror, but proximity: the sense that what nearly broke you remains close enough to breathe through your own mouth.
And yet the poem pivots—gently, incandescently—toward uplift.
Abjection here is not a terminal state; it is the hinge.
The moment before flight when the body is still dense with what it has shed.
The upward movement—lift—feels earned precisely because it rises out of that psychic sediment, as if the poem’s radiance requires the dark tunnel’s residue to ignite.
The speaker’s awakening into light—always a dangerous trope for poets of the highest order—is therefore not simply metaphor for transcendence, but rather, a reckoning with the self’s permeability. To be lifted is to feel—for an instant—the unboundedness of one’s own survival, the way the world enters us even as we step out into it. Goett’s poem captures this permeability: illumination exposes not only what is outside, but also what moved within us while we were looking away—as a gifted poet might feel her way through a poem.
In this sense, After a Dark Tunnel, Uplift, Lift becomes a study in abjection as generative force. Boundaries have faltered, and through those ruptures enter a new lyric possibilities:
a self remade in brightness, yet still trembling with the imprint of shadow; a voice rising because it has known what it means to nearly be unvoiced; a poem that carries the shimmer of the threshold itself through the threshold itself.
Here, uplift is neither a ladder nor its rungs. It is the luminous—and one might say, numinous—aftermath of having been touched—alchemized—by what no self might entirely contain.
The line — “God’s ... or the tumors’” — is an articulation of the Kristevan abyss. The speaker looks into the mirror of snow, and snow looks back, but its gaze is doubled, tripled, as mise-en-abîme motored by malignancy. The tumor is precisely the abject: alive but not-self, inside yet not of the body: a vertiginous, nauseating instability of identity.
Throughout Goett’s poem, snowflakes and cancer cells share a morphology: dispersed, drifting, fleck-like, proliferating. Goett transforms this horror — the sheer recognizability of death emerging from within — into a radiant shimmer. The abject is not denied; it is aestheticized into a trembling, almost unbearable, nearly heart-breaking beauty.
Kristeva writes that abjection is marked by a “fascination with what can destroy life.”
Goett’s speaker, astonishingly, leans into that fascination.
She watches the world unmask “a dream.” She addresses Bliss as if it were a partner—the adagio movement of some grand pas de deux—guiding her, palm to waist—through her own dissolution. She is already half among the flakes.
The Poetics of Ascent and the Violence of Lift
Throughout, Goett animates the doubleness of metaphor: uplift as joy, uplift as severing, how the poem shimmers between these two states, settling on neither the one nor the other. Snow lifts the world into radiance even as the speaker’s body is lifted out of itself. The gondolier who summons her to a golden feast is both Charon and host, ferryman and seducer. The invitation she has no choice but to “accept” is terminal.
But this is where the Kristevan abject flares most fiercely.
Abjection is the body recognizing its own borderlessness.
Kristeva insists that the abject is not the corpse itself, but the moment one realizes one will become a corpse — the boundary crisis, the shudder of recognition.
But must Goett’s poetic moment dwell within a Kristevan despair almost Dantesque in the purity of its hopelessness?
There is a moment in Camera Lucida when Barthes, writing toward the image of his dead mother, feels his body falter. He doesn’t say “abjection.” He doesn’t need to. The entire treatise is a trembling around that word—an orbit of grief so intimate that the language can barely hold it.
If abjection dwells where body recognizes its own borderlessness, then Barthes is our most tender theorist of the rupture. He knows, for example, that the photograph is not merely an image, but a membrane that leaks: time leaks, loss leaks, the self leaks. Standing before the Winter Garden Photograph—that moment when his narrative shifts away from theoretical toward a meditation on loss and photography’s intrinsic relationship to mortality—he himself does not remain intact. In common with the embodied voice of Goett’s poem, he too turns permeable. Porous. Overrun, in his case, by the mother he mourns, and in pari passu with Goett, by the finitude he cannot escape.
Barthes writes as though the photograph is not an object but a solvent—something that dissolves the boundary between life and the life that has been taken from him. The punctum, that sudden and ungovernable prick, is not a wound inflicted from without; it is an opening from within, an aperture through which the self spills.
“The punctum is not only a sting,” he murmurs in his shy incandescence, “it is the place where I cease to be separate.”
This is the borderlessness Goett’s speaker means to navigate.
In Barthes’ hands, the abject is not grotesque. Neither corpse nor viscera nor the bodily expulsions that horrify the classical theorists. Barthes gives us a quiet abjection—an abjection of tenderness, in which the self collapses into the photograph’s unrelenting truth.
The photograph tells him:
You are already vanishing.
It tells him:
Your edges were always a fiction.
And so he writes, almost whispering, as though afraid the page might startle:
– I am undone.
– Her death flickers through me like a second skin.
– The photograph traverses my body; it does not stay outside me.
This is abjection as Barthes would know it—not the revulsion of the expelled, but the helpless sweetness of recognizing that the body is not sovereign. That love itself has borders porous as vellum. That grief is a solvent dissolving whatever the I believed itself to be.
The photograph brings him to that intoxicating brink: where the body knows it cannot hold its shape. Where the mind flickers into otherness. Where mourning becomes a form of borderlessness, form without border, and the borderlessness becomes—paradoxically—the last trace of determination.
He does not avert his gaze.
He lets the draft take him.
Goett’s speaker shares this spectral space with Barthes. She renders the crucial moment not with horror but with awe:
I will be limp by 7,
as white as a ghost.
Here, the speaker does not recoil from her ghostliness; she simply names it, almost gently, as one might note the weather, risking the cliché the way Mozart would risk the tune so sweetly memorable that it took over his sonata. This composure is not denial but transfiguration — a Kristevan acceptance of the body’s imminent unmaking.
As in Phaedo, where death does not arrive as theorem but as weather — felt before it is named, as if drifting in from some offstage horizon. Socrates refuses the scaffolding of stages; he offers instead a tide chart of surrender, the body registering its own vanishing in increments. The hemlock enters quietly, a frost traveling upward through the limbs — he and the attendant simply track its progress, like watchers of a far-off brushfire, noting when sensation dims, when breath thins. Plato records it almost clinically, yet its tone — uncannily — leans toward Goett’s prevailing register: that threshold where the body’s failure becomes the narrow aperture through which spirit flares.
Socrates keeps speaking as the paralysis ascends — calm, lucid, unshaken by the body’s slow erasure — as though thought itself were searching for the final unoccupied room before the house burns down. Goett circles this moment like a psalmist at the edge of a field — returning to the body not merely as vessel but as weathered threshold, a perimeter beyond which we cannot follow, but through which we might still listen. What Plato traces with a philosopher’s clarity, Goett hears with an oracle’s ear: all the radiance is on the other side of pain.
Abjection is also the eruption of the semiotic — the pre-linguistic, the bodily, the pulsing, the inchoate energies of language. Goett’s fills with drifts made of semiotic rupture: wind, snow, bees, light, the murmuration of cells. The body dissolves not into void but into sound, into motion, into flecked luminosity.
In this way, the poem performs a gymnastic reversal worthy of an Olympic medal: the body doesn’t expel the world, the world absorbs the body.
The Radiant Abject: Illness As Luminous Material
Illness, in the Kristevan sense, is the most intimate abject — the body’s mutiny, its treachery, its refusal to uphold the fiction of unity.
Goett writes:
“& luminosity
the cancer everywhere—”
This is the abject rendered incandescent.
Not a stain, not a rupture, but a source of illumination.
Not a contamination, but a revelation.
The abject, Kristeva reminds us, is both repulsive and magnetic — it pushes us away even as it pulls us toward the site of our own undoing. Goett captures this doubleness:
“cells lost in whiteout, in whorl,
like a murmuration of bees.”
Cells morph into bees. Bees morph into snow. Snow into light. Light into the body undone. The speaker’s dissolution is choreographed, almost celebratory.
Abjection and the Letter of Refusal
The poem’s final movement — the letter declining a dinner invitation — is a near-perfect Kristevan gesture.
Abjection collapses personal boundaries.
Illness collapses social boundaries.
Declining a dinner translates into declining the world.
She writes:
“Excuse me, the new drug.
I am sure it decimates boundaries—”
Here abjection is named outright.
The “boundaries” between body and world, between self and self-image, between health and dissolution have already eroded, and she knows it. Yet the tone is polite, even wry — the speaker constructing the last scaffolding of subjecthood even as it disintegrates beneath her.
And then to the final astonishing vision:
I a dandelion’s spent head become the specular image,
an iron filing drawn in the magnet’s attraction
to the bliss of flesh called astonishment...
Abjection sublimates into radiance.
The body dissolves, but the astonishment remains.
What Matter Matters
The abject — the dissolution of the self, the encroaching presence of the not-self — can be read not merely as terror but as illumination.
If Ocean Vuong writes memory as smoke, family as ghost-light—vanishing rendered with tenderness and astonishment
and Ada Limon writes hope and despair twined in the same breath,
Goett limns the poetics of luminous abjection —
where the body deliquesces into world-shimmer,
and the self gathers into snow-light.
The Abject as Radiant
“After a Dark Tunnel, Uplift, Lift” never looks away. It does not deny the abject facts of illness — the tumors, the fatigue, the unmooring — but neither does it capitulate to despair.
Instead, it reveals the anomalous truth articulated by Kristeva: that abjection is signaled in the moment when the self meets, face-to-face, the limit of its coherence.
Goett spins that moment incandescent.
Astonishment is her final gesture —
not terror, not resignation,
but uplift.
This life
“passes, is passed,”
and in its passing
becomes radiance.