Reviewed by Michael Lang

Store shelves stand empty in the prelude to a hurricane. Cockroaches swarm a new home, pouring through holes in walls. Fire ants crawl hungrily across a car mat before a routine trip to an obstetrician. These are some of the vivid moments that inform Kelly Ann Jacobson's chapbook, An Inventory of Abandoned Things. Comprised of 13 vignettes told from the perspective of the same first-person narrator, Inventory encompasses several years of the narrator's life alongside her partner and daughter, focusing on her move from Washington D.C. to Florida to attend higher education. More than in any other collection I have read, Jacobson explores how the environment of a new place—its animals, insects, weather, and even its people—can be a transformative force in the lives of newcomers who must navigate a fresh landscape to create, maintain, and, perhaps, make permanent a home in a strange place. But Inventory is more than that: its stories contain a set of short yet powerful experiences that drives a fundamental change in the narrator's persona, a shift in her perspective. That shift is where we find the greatest energy of this chapbook, made even more powerful by Jacobson's eloquent and seamless first-person narration.

From the opening sentences of Inventory's first story, "Candles," Jacobson propels us forward with a sense of the ominous as the narrator and her partner prepare for a hurricane: "The third store we visit has been raided. The shelves are like rows of gapped teeth—missing flashlights, missing batteries, missing fans, missing gallon jugs of water. Our list is a prayer in your clasped hands." This striking introduction is a warning to us, revealing how quickly the narrator's environment can become a threat to her, her partner, and her then-unborn child, Skye.

Jacobson continues her exploration of this theme as Inventory progresses: "Beating Stick" pits the narrator and her partner against a swarm of greedy roaches; in "The Drey," squirrels are the menace, making a nest in the eaves of their home; and "The Mask" explores a threefold pressure—the brutal Florida humidity, the dangerous vapors from volatile organic compounds in a kitchen remodeling, and a group of thieves who once robbed the narrator's home. From these stories, we see the world and its denizens as things to be reckoned with, even if we'd rather they remain passive and allow the narrator and her family free movement and untroubled lives. These challenging forces demand a specific response from the narrator, an "adapt and overcome" perspective, which influences her, particularly when she thinks of her partner. At the end of "The Drey," when the narrator has picked up her partner at the airport from a business trip to D.C., she thinks:

You do not understand. You are fresh from D.C., and you would readily put up the For Sale sign and move back today if only I would hurry up and graduate. You even smell like the other house, the vanilla air freshener and the backyard fern garden and the sheets under which you enjoyed your uninterrupted sleep. No squirrels. No Skye. No roaches. No alerts from the Arlo system we set up after those men cased our house.

Through the narrator's desperate honesty, we see the shaping power of her environment and how much it has come to impact her response to her partner. Within these thoughts are the seeds of a future separation that may never have grown had the narrator's environment remained the same.

But there is a lighter, more positive side to the environment, too, something that Jacobson presents in a delightful manner. In "Terrarium," a shocking moment when the narrator accidentally crushes an anole lizard in a doorjamb becomes one of motherly kindness when she rushes the tiny creature to a veterinarian. Later, as she recounts the accident to her students, she frets that her actions identify her as an outsider in her community, but her students can only view her as charming and "cute." This experience opens her to new assessment of herself: she is becoming "more a part of the landscape than ever before—not antagonistic, not apathetic, but active, a working piece of this strange city where anoles stop-motion animate across the bright green palmettos and humans are wounds cut to the bone over which nature must heal." Her "strange city" is not only growing on her: she is growing within it.

"Cow Baby" continues this idea as it presents the majesty of Florida wildlife, the "surprisingly graceful" manatees whose slow and hypnotic presence inspire an awe within the narrator that "will not wane after two years" have passed. And as the narrator listens to the pattering rain in "Umbrella Holder, Always Empty," she thinks of it as "an audience clapping" and her "the speaker soaking it all up, not yet able to raise [her] hand or clear [her] throat and say 'You're too kind.'" These stories reveal how an environment can also inspire and influence, creating lasting impressions that uplift the narrator, helping her to develop in positive ways. She learns that her environment is not always something to fear or battle against and begins to see the greater possibility that Florida holds for her: a place she can make her permanent home. Never is this realization clearer than at the end of the chapbook's final story, "Five Paint Samples Stacked in the Closet, Perpetually Dripping." As the narrator speculates on who will be the "future renters" of her house if she and her partner move back to D.C., she concludes in a single line of a new paragraph that they very well might be her.

It is this realization that distills the powerful message of Inventory to its sharpest point: an environment, through its positive and negative influence, can fundamentally change an individual's outlook on life. With that changed outlook, a person can then reshape the course of their future, discovering and considering new, sometimes difficult, paths forward. Jacobson's intimate first-person narrative perspective grants us welcome access to her narrator's views of motherhood, landscape, and relationships, allowing us to see the narrator's innermost personal change. From there, the rest is up to us. Will we find in our own lives the change that the narrator experienced in hers? Or will we continue along our well-worn paths, armed with a greater awareness of the transformative powers around us? In either case, one thing is certain: what we learn from An Inventory of Abandoned Things can only make us better.