Imagine: you are a nonbinary cowboy in small-town America, and your lover has just left you. There’s nothing between you, your loneliness, and the beckoning desert. What do you do to soothe the ache in your heart? In the words of the narrator of Country Songs for Alice, “the only balm for anything is that you can sing about it.” Published by Tupelo Press in March 2024, Emma Binder’s poetry chapbook Country Songs for Alice is an odyssey of desire, loneliness, transformation, and acceptance. All titled some variation of “Song,” the poems chronicle the fall of a queer relationship in rural America through the narration of a nonbinary cowboy. At turns, the cowboy croons. They wail. They gnash their teeth and beat their chest, all for the lover who leaves them behind in the desert. The poems seethe with want, and the reader seethes with them.
The collection is divided into three sections, each with its own narrative focus. In the first section, the poems are tender and devotional, even as the object of their devotion bites. The cowboy is a moth to Alice’s neutron star, doggedly ignoring the signs of their lover’s impending departure. In this section, horses emerge as an image central to the collection, representing the good times of the relationship and Alice herself, wild and beautiful. If the poems’ contexts are not enough, the reader may gauge the relationship’s standing just by the mention (or lack) of horses. In “Song #4,”every time the cowboy tries “to think of their girl’s freckled cheeks or schoolboy shirt, they see horses.” They’re enraptured by horses’ daring and pageantry, but foremostly their inability to be tamed. Yet dark skies loom: “On the other side of wilderness is the terror / they’ll feel when it’s over: raw grief, hooves pounding / their heart.”
This section also displays Binder’s more playful uses of language, notably with the poem “Dirt Song.” One of the only poems of the collection to have a distinct title, each short, staccato line contains the word “dirt,” creating an upbeat, livewire tempo reminiscent of slammed boots against the grimy floor of a dive bar.
Additionally, “Song #7” could read as Binder’s ars poetica—different storytelling manners as approaches to poetry. To the narrator, “some [people] talk slow, like the thawed sap of a river / coming loose.” Others, when they talk, “are dancing in the schoolyard between / what’s heavy and light, dead and alive.” But some people, those the narrator deems “useful,”
seem to talk in circles, which,
to an unwitting ear, might look like repetition.
But every time they return to the same ground,
their bootprints sink deeper and the shape
of their path becomes script.
These “useful” people come to their audience with “pockets full of unearthed tokens that they found / while treading the same places, trying to understand what’s buried and what wants to get found.” Binder brings forth artifact after artifact of a relationship’s end—cracked cassette tapes, the heart of a fox, a rose pinned to a lapel—for the readers to marvel at in their hands.
Binder drives the narrative forward while lingering on certain moments and images—moonlight pooling softly in a cupholder in “Song #5” shifts into a white-fire beam burning a hole in a bigot’s boot later in the poem. Though this is Binder’s first poetry collection, their talent for transforming images is undeniable, and it’s no wonder this collection won the Tupelo Press 2022 Snowbound Chapbook Prize.
The dark undercurrent of the collection surfaces in the second section. The relationship begins to dissolve and Alice’s mercuriality rears its head. In the cowboy’s memories, Alice is like a mirage in the desert heat, flickering and intangible. She transforms into “a deadly wind, then a statue,” then “the legs of horses / or a lion,” then a “pear tree, nightmare, froth on the undersides of slate-blue clouds.” In truth, part of the appeal of these poems comes from Alice’s duality. She’s not the honey or sweetie of a typical country love song. She is beautiful and terrible, as likely to bruise as to kiss, which makes the narrator’s wanton devotion that much more compelling. They are pathetic with want for Alice, even after her abandonment. Alice’s flightiness emerges in this section as well: on the road in “Song #11,” the cowboy catches Alice’s longing for the distant plains, and after picking up a hitchhiker, she displays “a tenderness [the cowboy] hadn’t seen in months.”
Alice abruptly leaves, but for where? Neither the narrator nor the reader can tell, with the only clue being a vague mention of “south.” In Alice’s absence, our cowboy falls into a self-imposed exile, driving themselves into the desert. Their retreat inadvertently unlocks “the animal parts” of themselves—all the things without human labels. They remark, “with no one around / you can be anything: animal, mineral, cloud pattern, blade.” Though hurting, they are released from their identity and experiences with Alice into the arms of the desert. Out on the plains, away from society, our cowboy joins the “secret net” that connects all, from the shadowed fox to the snakes burrowed in the soil. Here, the collection becomes not just a lament for a bygone relationship, but a single, sustained love song to the desert and the shared threads that run through all things.
The final section is a single poem, aptly titled “The Last Song.” Slipping into the trope of the stiff-lipped cowboy with tears hidden by the brim of their Stetson, Binder’s cowboy plays off missing Alice, even as they wake from nightmares in their truck in her absence. They escape to the desert, yet can’t help but wish for Alice’s presence. The poem is a wandering account of self-destruction, resolution, and acceptance, with the narrator in a cheekily self-referential moment admitting:
I understand that country songs
are meant to describe a feeling, at most a chapter,
because you can’t live your life
while you’re hurting and drinking that way.
The collection ends with the cowboy closing this chapter of their life, having detoxed from their post-breakup bender. Without Alice, they find belonging in the homes of friends and in the desert itself.
The poems in this chapbook resonate with a sense of queer belonging in an often believed hostile landscape—rural America. Indeed, much of Country Songs’ charm comes from Binder’s refusal to write in submission to small-town homophobia. Their cowboy looks down upon people too close-minded to see and hear the world's beauty, while they and Alice burn with vitality. When the pair of them are confronted by a bigot outside a bar in “Song #6,” “it’s like a matchstick lost / to prairie fire.” In Binder’s collection, queer desire is not shameful but celebrated, even elevated to celestial—in bed with Alice in “Song #3,” the cowboy remarks, “the sounds that didn’t leave me spun / into small, silver comets in my chest.”
These poems mark an addition to the growing trend of queer artists lassoing the country genre from its heteronormative and masculine associations, with performers like Chappell Roan, Lil Nas X, and Orville Peck adopting stage personas that embrace the aesthetics of cowboy culture. With Country Songs for Alice and its story of yearning and acceptance, Binder adds their voice to the building chorus, all singing the same message: queer country is here, baby, and it’s here to stay.
