I can’t quite tack down the moment it happened, but I woke up one day split into a million selves. A sea of past selves flitted like ghosts, inhabiting my body, carried from the furthest corners of every place I had moved from—a sleepy town in Oklahoma, only known for its water tower; desert-dusted streets in Modi’in, Israel, where things didn’t work out for my family; and the Big Dry of eastern Montana, with its ruthless winters. Currently, in the rolling hills of the Idaho Palouse, another phantom starts to tear away from my whole. Parts forever in motion—I never feel present or whole in a crowded room, nor with a lover, not even atop a silent mountain.

I’ve stopped unpacking boxes, so I’m always ready to move. I’ve become infatuated with the road, constantly needing the movement of outrunning ghosts. I stop in towns most people have never heard of, like Chugwater, for Red Bull and to splash water on my face in the cracked bathroom mirror, or Aberdeen, where a man outside of a diner once pulled up in a pickup with a plastic trash bag taped over his rear window and offered me an amber bottle of liquid for $60. I’ve developed an itch to never stay too long, to sprinkle stray-hair-selves at every stop, to feel more at home with strangers than in the places I’ll eventually need to return to. Each time, I mourn myself as if I’ve been alive a thousand years. 

As I prepared this summer to move my partner, Bossan, from Montana to Indiana for graduate school—a 1,500-mile trip—Caylin Capra-Thomas’s Iguana Iguana fell into my lap. A collection of poems, Iguana Iguana is a fragmented road trip of geographical vignettes. While reading, it was easy to imagine the speaker pulling up at my doorstep in an old, beat-up Subaru Outback covered in faded gift shop stickers; she’s modern Plath-grunge as she rolls down her window, lowers her shades, and asks me if I want a ride. 

Capra-Thomas’s speaker has two foremost selves, the Montana Self and the Florida Self, who each grapple with the existence of the other as the speaker spends different seasons in the two states. Throughout the pages, Capra-Thomas reveals glimpses of slighter selves—road bodies—in snapshots (even the Boston Self, which the speaker seems inclined to forget). Slightly older than I, the speaker, in her thirties, mourns her youth and gets drunk on the loneliness of every person she has ever been. 

The collection opens with a single prefacing poem titled “Passage.” The speaker stands at a river, gazing at a group of teenagers (presumably her younger selves) who resemble “suspicious crows”—they’re naïve, anxious, and waiting to drink from the life they’ve dreamed of. The scene seems like it’s set in a moment that has already occurred, as if the speaker is standing on the other bank looking back at her life. She says “that the French word for to happen also means to arrive, / that sometimes we say deceased when we mean/departed.”

Swept up in all of the selves she’s been, and those she’s poured herself into, the speaker has become a roaring, relentless body in motion pulling everything from the banks into her current. Capra-Thomas juxtaposes water imagery with continued mentions of crows, as the nervous jitters of living in the present while having already lived in the past—the many selves—threaten to take flight. 

This poem is an ode to the experience that the audience will share in the following pages. A train swiftly approaches to snatch up the speaker and “…lay open the hills” to which she’s not yet traveled. She yearns to pour herself into other channels—other selves—but fears the knowledge that the present will one day be done—a past upon itself, compelling her to continue becoming. 

I read the first section of Iguana Iguana aloud as my partner navigated her GMC Envoy down the endless knife of prairie that cuts through eastern Montana. The morning was young. Antelope shook sleep from their bones, freshly baled hay waited to be gathered and procured for the winter, and I sneaked glances at Bossan who wiped tears that had welled at the corners of her eyes. Her bond with the west is strong. Having moved to the United States from Turkmenistan for school, she spent undergrad split between Wyoming and Montana and has come to call these landscapes home. As we ate up the miles and broke into South Dakota, the mountains sunk into the rearview; we stared straight out into the bottomless space ahead—that which we’d yet to pour ourselves into.

In the first section of Capra-Thomas’s collection, the speaker grapples with the passing of time and its burden on the body. In the opening poem of the first section, “Window,” the speaker says, “it is easier, I suppose to wrap myself in myself.” While she finds comfort in her own skin, her body has its limitations and fails to stifle the loneliness. She cooks in the kitchen, “near naked by the kitchen window,” with the hope that anyone passing by will look in and notice her. This moment seems voyeuristic as the speaker immediately makes herself vulnerable to the reader, which I wouldn’t expect in the beginning of a collection. The speaker’s rawness makes me want to cover my eyes with my hands, but I can’t help but peek through the slats. The most heartbreaking realization is that the speaker is not yearning to be gazed upon admiringly; she is seeking validation that she exists in proximity to others. 

Another poem, “Crosscut,” frames the human body—more specifically the female body—as something possessing little agency, something often broken by another force. The speaker grieves that “the line between the hurt body and the body that hurts is razor-thin and traversable.” Here, she addresses the internal and external forces that can cause a person to feel corporeally helpless. Capra-Thomas makes a parallel of the body with felled trees, which have been split into fragments that provide comfort for “the woodsman” but offer little solace for the speaker herself. Many times throughout Section I, the speaker appears to be conditioned by trauma inflicted on her by others that fractures her into little pieces of comfort that she hands out to those who need it. This is seen in a comforting letter she writes to her sister and in her attempt to nurture a tomato plant—without having the knowledge of how to do so effectively. As the speaker gives herself to the landscape and to others around her, she feels herself start to age, and she grieves. 

The Montana Self, which first arrives in “Past-Life Self Portrait with Mountains,” seems to be the speaker’s oldest version of self. This is the first self that the speaker left behind, but she carries it within her wherever she goes— “the version of myself that stayed and figured out how to forage for morels.” I, as reader, feel a contradiction when I try to isolate my oldest self. When I think about the self I left in Montana, the phantom that I see is filled with some of my most grief-stricken moments and some of my happiest moments. That self seems like he is constantly in hibernation—a container of fixed years of experiences—as he lies in wait for me to return. 

The speaker of Capra-Thomas’s poem reflects on what life she might’ve had if she stayed in Montana. The problem with motion is the splitting that it enforces—after, one can never be fully whole again. Once we build an attachment to a place, it tethers us. The mountains and the pines and the landscape wrapped the speaker in roots that felt like home. But once we leave—and the speaker has, and I have—the selves created elsewhere will have to combat the roots of the first. 

…Montana me, you go on
somewhere, still burning it down every year, still 
bursting into being in spring like flies or pines

The “it” here is both the present landscape and the self that the speaker assumes within it. There is a sense of masochism to the poem as the speaker realizes that, anywhere she goes, she can light herself aflame when she is not content with who she is. When someone burns her down, the Montana Self will immerge from the ashes, like a phoenix, outliving everything else. 

I didn’t read the second section of Iguana, Iguana until Bossan and I stopped in Sioux City for the night. We pulled a long day on the road, only stopping for a few minutes to wander through Wall Drug. I don’t think anyone ever knows why they stop at Wall Drug; they just do. Plus, there are the continuous, giant billboards beckoning for many miles in either direction. In Sioux Falls, we picked up food at the only gyro restaurant open at night. Somehow, right up to a few weeks before Bossan had to move, neither of us knew that the other loved gyros. In the short time we had, we went for them as often as we could. She ordered hers without onions and lettuce, and I slathered hot sauce on mine. In Sioux City, we rented an Airbnb room in what used to be an orphanage for girls. As I parked the car and stared up at the big house in the dark, I wondered if you could claim to have visited a place without spending time there. That night, our sighs mixed in with the thrum of the air conditioner. As Bossan fell asleep, I sat on an antique bench by the window, running my hands through my hair, and gazed at her. As we got further away from Montana, I thought about the miles that I was helping to set between us, and how far away she’d be when I went back “home.”

Under lamplight in the Airbnb, I read Section II, in which the speaker is pulled in what feels like a thousand directions by the shifting tides of her family. A somber poem, “The Hawk,” greets the reader with a voice that seems like a departure from the Montana Self as the landscape shifts into Florida. “The Hawk” is also a goodbye to the speaker’s father. In the poem, the father (who is suffering from cancer) flies into Montana to take a road trip with his daughter. As he drives, the speaker scribbles into her notebook. The father passes a truck and muses aloud, “Sometimes when I’m traveling, I get a feeling like I could be home, and that guy in his truck would still be right there.” 

The father is considering the insignificant role that people play—perhaps, leaning on the desire to mean more, to hold significance in this world. I know that when one splits into road-bodies, finding a grounding space of being becomes difficult. Time passes, everywhere, with little to no regard for the bodies out of sight. The speaker asks, “Like it doesn’t matter whether you’re here or not?” and the father agrees. The father, coming to terms with his illness, is at peace with this realization, thinking about being “home” in Cape Cod while the trucker is still in Montana and a hawk is flying overhead. The speaker stays silent in her grief, especially when she realizes the bird up above isn’t a hawk but a vulture, waiting to claim her father. 

Like the various road selves that the speaker has picked up along the way, the Florida Self enters the scene grappling with another, the Montana Self. The speaker was coy in Section I, letting various characters—along with her selves—smudge her narrative, but, in this next part, it’s as if a dam has burst letting a clear, full cast—including her father, brother, sister, and mother—come alive, taking over the landscape. In “Cassiopeia” the brother “wakes sober in a house of sober men,” having presumably struggled with addiction. He works as a luggage handler at an airport in Cape Cod, passing the lives of tourists back toward their homes while he stays rooted in the east. The sister “…has not cut her thighs in weeks.” Everyone “…is doing well because you have adjusted your definition of “well,” the speaker says to herself. 

She does not call her family; she does not call her mother, whose husband is dying. Instead, she makes food, puts on a familiar movie, and tries to find comfort in the routine of a gray world. Her family is struggling, but so is the speaker. In the end of the poem, she stares up at Cassiopeia and wonders if the constellation will have any strength left to support the world once she grows tired and her arms falter. 

Once her father dies, the speaker’s Florida Self takes center stage to unpack the arrival of her mother’s new lover, Jim James. Capra-Thomas uses the collection’s title poem, “Iguana Iguana,” as a space for her speaker to reflect on the things that consume and take up space. “What is a guest if not something that takes a little bit of your life?” Apparently, iguanas are invasive in Florida, a space with which the speaker feels a kinship, a tethering of one of her selves. There are “too many iguanas, the William Carlos Williams of reptiles.” The iguanas become, of course, Jim James. He’s too much. Come winter, the iguanas will freeze, but the speaker won’t be there to see it. In Montana, away from her mother, it will be okay for the speaker to immerse herself in grief. “…What else is there to say but everything / we’ve said before, over and again? Iguana Iguana.”

The speaker is torn about having another man invade the void left by the father, but she also sees some sort of reflection of herself in the reptilian analogy; she herself feels invasive. At some point, it is easier to default to repetition as a coping mechanism—hence the extended iguana metaphor—to pretend things are normal instead of facing unresolved feelings. She’s spent enough time in Florida to call it home, but she still resists the temptation to fully set roots there. 

Bossan and I raced against the day as the thickest foliage swallowed the sun. The landscape became oversaturated and green in a way that made my skin itch. Swarms of trees adorned the sides of the highway, and grass and moss feasted on everything, making for an emerald ocean. Finally, we pulled into Bloomington, to the front of an apartment neither of us knew. 

The town howled as I opened the car door. The breath of humidity enveloped me, as if a dog exhaled on my face. I tasted the Midwest all at once. In the trees, creatures I couldn’t see screeched in a rhythm I can’t match—eerie. 

My partner and I roamed the aisles in Walmart, at a loss for what material would make this place her home. We settled on an air mattress, a toilet brush, a few Alani Nu energy drinks, toilet paper, and a bag of bagels. Pulling boxes from her car, we stacked her entire life in the living room. After we blew up the air mattress, Bossan fell asleep, but I drowned in the empty space. All of my selves invaded, swarming into a rare moment of silence.

There was no light in the room, so I huddled with my back against the wall next to a tiny lamp. In Indiana, it was well past midnight, but my watch was steadfast in Mountain Time. My family in Montana would’ve just been turning in at 9 PM; an hour behind that, in Pacific Time, in Idaho, my apartment would’ve yawned in the emptiness as the aloe vera plant on the kitchen table trembled. I was here, and there, and there, and nowhere all at once. Here, with my back pressed against the wall, I grounded my shoulder blades so I didn’t float away. I finished Iguana Iguana.

In Section III, the speaker comes to terms with the deep river of loneliness associated, in the text, with the passing of time. Here, the Montana Self has started to seep, again, into the narrative, like a spilled bottle of ink. In a struggle, the Montana Self has overtaken the Florida Self. The speaker is older here, reflecting on the many selves created and lives lived. In the poem “We Were Younger Then,” the speaker reminisces on a time when she was reckless and “…not at home in ourselves.” This shift is vital as the entire poem takes place from the plural “we;” a second character is evident—the speaker in present tense—layering herself onto the past. 

Instead of turning inward for comfort, the speaker sought the world; she yearned for the open road, poured herself into every state she had yet to scatter a self in. 

Risking, drinking, and pill popping, the speaker and her friends “…swore we crackled, swore we burned,” yet they were left in a freezing hollow—not feeling home anywhere, including their own skin. “Every year, the younger self dissolves like Alka-Seltzer in today’s waters,” the speaker says, perhaps reminding the audience of the opening poem, “Passage.” We’ve finally arrived in a connecting ley line moment, meeting the speaker in the present. In this instance, she isn’t mourning her younger selves, per se, but reflecting on the residue that they left behind. While the stink of youth has dissolved within her, it still remains in the container of her body. She turns inward, finally building a home in the four walls of her skin instead of smudging into the landscape. In the end of the poem, residue phantoms of the younger selves align with the speaker in a rare instance of unity. These selves feel less prominent than the Montana and Florida selves, like soft, older voices; as if they know something she doesn’t, they encourage the speaker to keep going, to keep living, “get up, get up, get up.” 

Throughout the entire collection, each self coaxes the speaker back, tugging on rope attached to her feet, chipping away at her resistance until she gives in. Finally, in “Alter Egos Talk Back,” the speaker opens the gates and ushers the selves into the same Colosseum. The selves are angry at the speaker; “She has taken everything from us.” The selves feel abandoned as they continue with their lives, tending gardens in Montana, caring for a plant in Massachusetts, admiring art in Florida. They wait for her; she doesn’t return. 

While the selves have been in combat for most of the narrative, they finally find common ground in the speaker’s neglect. This instance is pivotal as the speaker has successfully, momentarily, rejected the tether of any of her selves. This, of course, leads to a question: who is she becoming?

In the closing poem, “Turning,” the speaker goes back to Montana. She returns to the “old Ford” and to the pines, some of which are yellow—bark beetles have moved into the valley, poisoning the giants. The speaker feels “fine…& fine spreads its gauze over the valley’s deep gouge.” She says: 

…Quake. For you will
be older soon. & you know

you are already. & the little 
coins of aspen leaf are still living. 

& the dead half flicks its gold on & off
like the ghosts at the switch. 

the windows of your life lit long enough
for you to see them as they close.

Capra-Thomas draws the audience back to “Window” from Section I; the speaker at the collection’s end no longer wishes to be seen. She realizes the grief that she feels—from her fractured family, from the pull of all her selves, from being insignificant in a planet on which her body spins. She realizes that time will pass, regardless of whether she tries to capture it or not. Instead of being the river, she submerges herself into the dark waters, and everything is quiet for a moment. 

While she’s underwater, I board my first of two flights back to Montana from where I’ll drive the ten hours to my “home” in Moscow, Idaho. Bodies never get used to the twilight of movement; it’s just a constant case of rooting and uprooting. After all, what are bodies, save for containers of experience—full of where we’ve been and where we’re going? Brimming, we spill out at the intersecting state lines. Sometimes, I think about driving across the country and lassoing all my selves by the horns, capturing them in a tiny mason jar with no holes. Or that it may have been easier to never leave my original self at all.