Review: One Cigarette Behind God (A Review Of Steel Slides And Yellow Walls By Alicia Swain)

By Tessa Klein

If poetry is, as I have always suspected, a form of elegant bloodletting—then Alicia Swain’s Steel Slides and Yellow Walls is a full-on arterial spray. It is not a book for the delicate of constitution, nor for those cowardly souls who go to verse in search of sonnets about teacups or the joys of rustic sunset. No, this is poetry carved with a broken bottle. It is felt, in the visceral, shuddering sense of the word.

Swain, unlike so many of her contemporaries who mistake sentimentality for significance, writes with the flint-eyed clarity of one who has stared long into the abyss and dared it to blink. Her collection, drenched in trauma and resurrection, is not some simpering diary masquerading as literature—it is a philosophical autopsy of modern womanhood conducted with the precision of a scalpel and the fury of a chainsaw.

She does not merely speak; she accuses. Her questions are not rhetorical—they are indictments. "How do you expect the children to learn / what you will not let them understand?" she demands in Curriculum, a poem that reads like a firebomb lobbed into the Church of American Hypocrisy. These are not poems; they are testimonies delivered in the dock, and God help the listener if they aren’t ready to be judged in return.

Indeed, in Swain’s world, the personal is inextricably political. She drags the rotting corpses of patriarchy, organized religion, domestic abuse, and mental illness into the daylight and dares you to look away. And yet, despite its blistering rage, the collection refuses the cheap redemption arc. Swain offers no platitudes, no easy victories—only progress, one step forward at a time, blood still drying on the boots.

Is the work uneven in places? Naturally. All volcanoes are. But even in its weaker moments, Steel Slides and Yellow Walls never panders, never flinches. Its strength lies not in perfection, but in its commitment to truth—which is, as we know, the rarest and most revoltingly avoided substance in American letters.

Swain’s metaphors are taut as piano wire, her structure sharp and unadorned, and her voice—most gloriously of all—angry. And what a relief that is. For in an age of terminal timidity, here is a woman who writes like she means to set the house on fire and then dance in the ashes.

I will not compare Swain to Plath or Sexton or any other sainted suicide the literati trot out for lazy context. No—Swain is not seeking inclusion in the canon; she is calling for its demolition. And I, for one, am happy to hand her the sledgehammer.

This is a ferocious, important debut. May she never learn to behave.

Tessa Klein is a Brooklyn-based writer, amateur hypnotist, and former florist. She is currently at work on a memoir about desire, debt, and women who disappear on purpose.