In Unexpected Alchemy, poet Skye Nicholson shares her journey of recovery — and empowerment — after ending 25 years of alcohol abuse. Her poems are filled with soaring language, fraught memories, and poignant images of motherhood and self-acceptance. Paired with artful images from illustrator Cheryl Liz Byers, her words evoke a courageous and raw honesty that illuminates how decades of addiction and shame can dissolve through vulnerability, compassion and self-love.
After finding freedom from alcohol in 2018, thanks in part to Annie Grace’s bestselling book This Naked Mind, poetry was the catalyst that shook the dust out of Skye’s shadows and aired her newly open soul in the sunlight. The beauty of her story is in its transformative nature: the dichotomy of discovering love through loathing, joy through sorrow, and wisdom through pain. Skye is ever on the life-long journey of personal growth, but she has learned the importance of breath, stillness, and sunlight to nurture her soul.
In Unexpected Alchemy, poet Skye Nicholson shares her journey of recovery — and empowerment — after ending 25 years of alcohol abuse. Her poems are filled with soaring language, fraught memories, and poignant images of motherhood and self-acceptance. Paired with artful images from illustrator Cheryl Liz Byers, her words evoke a courageous and raw honesty that illuminates how decades of addiction and shame can dissolve through vulnerability, compassion and self-love.
After finding freedom from alcohol in 2018, thanks in part to Annie Grace’s bestselling book This Naked Mind, poetry was the catalyst that shook the dust out of Skye’s shadows and aired her newly open soul in the sunlight. The beauty of her story is in its transformative nature: the dichotomy of discovering love through loathing, joy through sorrow, and wisdom through pain. Skye is ever on the life-long journey of personal growth, but she has learned the importance of breath, stillness, and sunlight to nurture her soul.
Considered the most formidable and strenuous phase, Nigredo is the period of deconstruction. In Calcination, the raw material is vigorously reduced to ashes, or ‘burned down to the bones.’ The ashes become submerged in liquid during the Dissolution stage, rendering them saturated and formless.
SLOSHED
I am a wide-mouth Solo cup slinging ‘round an s-curve,
waking up in a hotel room
and more than once, a hallway,
the dregs of my brain drag my body like a corpse.
I lost keys like morals, like scruples, like scholarships and chances,
always coming-to on the other side of the world.
A circumstance claims its victim—but not me,
I was busy co-creating my own abyss,
a seasick dinghy riling up the waves.
All I wanted was to feel good
on the way to hell and make a new best friend
in the unisex bathroom—
and here I am, curled up fetal,
trying to find a heartbeat in the dirt and begging
the earth to take me back.
Blackout promises don’t mean a damn thing.
FIRES, PART I
I used to start fires everywhere—
the sweat-bees lining up
to taste the mineral of me
licking the magnesium
hoping for the fuse, and I
was twirling in flames
scorched and naked
as if my cells were silicone
eyes ablaze, dazed from the loss of it all
smoke-choked and wheezing
holding my breath—
I was riding sparks, kicking coals
touching toes to lighting bolts
and burning bridges to the ground.
The ancient science and philosophy of alchemy was aimed at achieving the best by transforming the raw, the crude. Skye Nicholson’s Unexpected Alchemy relives that tradition in poetic depiction of her life’s transformation.
These poems of “addiction and awakening” – as the poet calls them – follow the four alchemy phases and accordingly the book is divided in four sections: (1) Calcination and Dissolution, (2) Separation and Conjunction, (3) Fermentation, and (4) Distillation and Coagulation. In that order, the life in these poems starts raw, moves through wear-and-tear, dissolves and purifies, and ultimately becomes a new life that is beautiful and polished.
Nicholson’s poems in Unexpected Alchemy are short, mostly a page or less. Each poem, however, is a mini story of its own, or in many cases, a picture in words since it has distinct imagist features. Each poem comes as a chapter in a life undergoing alchemical transformation from the broken and despaired phase in “Sloshed” (the first poem) to the healed and at-peace state in “Return of Sandhill Cranes” (the last poem).
There are some prose poems in this collection and a few with specialized structures as against the standard stanza structure of traditional poetry. The shift in structure, at times, complements the general theme of transformation that laces the stories together in these poems. Aside from the familiar metaphor of journey for life, Unexpected Alchemy seems to employ several metaphors of nature for phases of life. In “Dissolved” (p. 24), the various states of water in nature – ebb, flow, freeze, thaw, condense etc – embody the range of emotions one experiences in their personal life facing challenges. There is more winter in the first half and more spring in the latter one, parallel to the transformation via alchemy.
The mode is mainly narrative and works best this way for memories of phases of life that make stories, which in turn become verse. This creates an alchemy of versification via Nicholson’s furnace of creativity – an “unexpected alchemy” if you will. Not surprisingly, she starts her poems “Fires Part I” (p. 9) and “Fires Part II” (p. 31) with the same line: “I used to start fires everywhere.”
Unexpected Alchemy brings the soul of life’s transformation out in lines that speak directly to the soul. Through this book, Skye Nicholson comes across genuine, strong, and alive.