Beyond the World’s Rim: A Review of Edison Jennings’s Reckoning by Angele Ellis

cover credit: Jacar Press

Reckoning by Edison Jennings

Jacar Press (2013)

Reviewed by Angele Ellis

Edison Jennings’s chapbook, Reckoning, is a masterful elegy in multiple voices that is also by turns rough and tender, wry and devastating.

As a young aircrewman in the U.S. Navy, Jennings “… from a P-3s vantage point, / watch[ed] Beirut burn.” In “Flight,” he connects this wartime experience with a boyhood memory of shooting at buzzards above an American farm, an activity the thirteen-year-old narrator and his friends find futile and mesmerizing; the predatory birds prove to be impossible targets. In the following passage, the narrator’s frustration and wonder are palpable:

…if we could only hit one,
to blow a hole in any bird that fed on carrion.
                                                                        Still we wondered
silently, how they rode the breeze forever
as if sanctified.

As the poem progresses, the images of flesh-eating birds become more powerful, mystical, and foreboding—“great-winged vultures” that pharaohs “deified,” “Dante’s circling song to death”—until the now-adult narrator becomes one with them above a flaming foreign city, “…charmed / flying in circles, like an icon.”

A range of responses to tragedy is at the ravaged heart of Reckoning. As Jennings (who now chairs the Division of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Intermont College) reminds the reader by quoting Webster’s dictionary on the book’s dedication page, one of this resonant word’s multiple meanings is being called to account.

Reckoning is dedicated to Jennings’s daughter, Lucy (1989-2010), who passed from cancer. Lucy appears, both directly and indirectly, in many of these poems. In “Reckoning II,” the narrator totals his enormous personal grief as a bookkeeper might. However, minimizing Lucy with this method serves only to magnify her. The loss of even one child tips the balance between life and death, as demonstrated by the emotion that breaks through the dry tone of the following passage:

The law of small numbers
implies her entry will be lost
in the long ledger of the dead…
so small and unaccountable.

In “Litany,” the narrator, elderly and possibly suffering from dementia, kneels in nightly prayer and keeps a more personal list of losses, ranging from “Fred” to “Haitians… nurses… Sudan.” But this aide de memoire is not enough—“twofaced sexanddeath outpaced him.” His “confusion” over the growing list leads to emotional overload, a form of amnesia. To this good-hearted but befuddled man (as to the reader), this seems necessary, a shameful penance:

…one night he even forgot his daughter,
bald and sick from chemo—with so much need
his knees would hurt, with so much yet to plead.

And in “Brown Eyed Girl,” the narrator’s grief stretches to the beginning of human history, linking his Lucy to a “Denisovan fossil” of a hominid girl who lived 2.6 million years ago. Time seems to collapse as the first brown-eyed girl becomes not only an ancestor but also a sister to the one newly dead, bringing the narrator a strange sense of comfort. The twinning of the two girls in the following passage signifies not only kinship, but also completion:

…My short-lived daughter, too,
had brown eyes and hair.
That makes us kin:
she through me and me though you.

Reckoning is not without moments of humor. The spunky old woman who narrates “Durable Goods” disposes of her worldly possessions with devilish glee, spitting in the eye of the death that is about to overtake her. Her “will” is as tart and refreshing as the spirit Jennings captures in these lines:

…“The body’s estate?” she said, “just stuff to stuff,
amen. Burn it and be done…Give Louanne
the four-post bed now that she’s found a lover,
and dare her to wear it out, if she can.”

And in “Rainstorm,” death takes a holiday on a road trip to rural Georgia, reminding the reader that life’s little but satisfying pleasures can be found in a “…Caddy [that] shimmied in the curves / and fish-tailed down the straights” and in “…lunch[ing] on RCs, Scooter Pies, / and watch[ing] the wipers skim / momentary half-moon vistas / lush with peach and pecan groves.”

The reminders of loss, however, lurk in many places in Reckoning: in the corpse of a poisoned mouse in “Nuptials,” whose “…tail ringed my finger, / wedding me to death”; in an old house’s coal furnace in “Feeding the Fire,” as the narrator “wipe[s] the smudge / of pitch-black dust that seams the lifeline of my palm”; in an unhappy woman’s vacuum cleaner—a Hoover Vortex Master—in “The Sympathy of Dust,” which preserves rather than obliterates “…a diary of dross…fragments of a narrative / she tracks from room to room.”

Reckoning circles back to Lucy in the book’s final poem, “Saudade” (in Portuguese, a feeling of intense melancholy or longing, a word with no English equivalent). Despite the narrator’s commitment to “commonsense things” to “keep the cold out” of his “ramshackle house,” saudade “…seeps through the floorboards, / pools in the corners, and laps up the stairs.” His diligent housework becomes irrelevant. Through the narrator, Jennings is drawn to examine—not for the first or the last time—the “vacuum” left by his daughter’s death, the icy center that connects existence and non-existence:

…I retreat to the wreck of your room
and wonder—the closest I come to prayer—
are you warm out there, beyond the world’s rim?

The Grass Was the Country: A Review of Sandy Longhorn’s The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths by Angele Ellis

cover credit: Jacar Press

The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths by Sandy Longhorn

Jacar Press, 2013

Review by Angele Ellis

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running. ―Willa Cather, My Antonia

In her second full-length collection (winner of the Jacar Press 2013 Full Length Book Contest), Sandy Longhorn reanimates Cather’s prairie—a fierce, enchanted landscape that becomes as fully realized as the people who inhabit, fight, and succumb to it. Like the dreamy and defiant girls of her fairy tales and myths, Longhorn’s prairie—an anthropomorphic presence, half-human, half-monster—seems to be running, as in “Fairy Tales for Girls in Love with Fire”:

…The horizon

caught fire and the eldest girl fell

for the smell of smoke, craved the heat

of flame and ember. Every adult tried

to hold her back from running toward

the leaping fervor… (38)

All four elements (fire, earth, wind, and water) contribute to the seduction and destruction of Longhorn’s yearning “girls,” in the throes of adolescent angst intensified by the isolation of Longhorn’s personified prairie, and by the patriarchs and matriarchs who abide by its harsh rules. In “Cautionary Tale for Girls Kept Underground in Summer,” a girl abandoned in a “clammy” basement by parents who “had lives to live / in the heat above the ground” becomes part of the earth itself:

…curled in upon herself, her fingers digging, digging

at the crack until she could slip her hands closer

to the dirt. They found her there, immovable,

her limbs tangled in the dense bed of roots, her speech

the foreign tongue of all things planted. (2)

And in “Fairy Tale for Girls Enthralled by the Storm,” “a girl who loved the prairie wind,” and whose father is “unnerved / by the way she smiled like a woman” bides her time until a season of tornadoes provides her with an otherworldly means of escape:

 …One night she slipped from bed and walked

into the rain. She took her place on that slight rise,

called out, was ready to be lifted and transformed. (35)

Longhorn’s precise language, alliterative lyricism, and masterful use of rhyme schemes ground her poems, making their fantastic endings both plausible and moving. Another technique that Longhorn uses brilliantly is the repetition of certain words in her titles and poems, including fairy, tale, cautionary, map, cartography, saint, girl(s). This repetition draws the reader into Longhorn’s spell—as when reading a book of fairy tales—transforming Longhorn’s stories into the reader’s.

Perhaps no story is complete without blood, and without the bloodlines that connect us to the artist’s past, as well as to our own. In “Midwest Nursery Tales,” a fox kills a girl who wanders heedlessly into a ripe field of alfalfa:

…all they found

were her shoes and a patch of blood-red

poppies. Each year those flowers bloomed

no matter how deeply they tilled the soil. (5)

In “It Matters, the Kind of Wound,” “poppies & chilies” bloom from a soil whose accumulated blood “…seeps and stains, marking a new / navigational point—a compass rose, / useless to the one who bled it.” (9)

Bloodlines become particularly poignant in the last of this book’s four sections, “Cartography as Elegy,” which moves from feminist mythmaking to speak more directly of life and death. Armed with “…a map of my home well folded, / creased along gossamer bloodlines” (“Autobiography as Cartography”) (53), Longhorn explores her family history. Throughout “In the Delicate Branches,” she traces her grandmother and mother’s decline:

            …Strong bones and a healthy body

           

can only take a person so far. At some point the heart

has to do its own bidding. At some point you

have to admit that the wolf guards the door. (55)

The mortality of her elders leads the poet to the realization that she may be the last branch of her family tree, in “Choosing Not to Bear”:

…Now, as the hourglass of my womb empties,

I refuse to turn

the moonlight sands

on end again…

           

yet my empty womb is a bursting star…

                      Meanwhile, my mother

lines her life with the silver and gold

            of her last,

                                  her starburst daughter… (56)

As Willa Cather’s “starburst daughter[s]” (in Longhorn’s phrase) rise from the prairie waves to seek and find personal and professional freedom—or in some cases, to be tragically pulled under—so do Sandy Longhorn’s. As Cather makes her “running” prairie the archetypical American heartland, reaching far beyond regionalism to capture the imagination and sympathy of a wide audience, so does Sandy Longhorn in The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths. 

Postcards from the Terrible, Available World: A Review of Rebecca Cook's I Will Not Give Over by Marc Sheehan

Cover credit: Aldrich Press

I Will Not Give Over by Rebecca Cook

Aldrich Press (2013)

Reviewed by Marc Sheehan

Perhaps the main poetic mode of the last few of decades has been a detached voice—ironic and non-committal. In this neo-Ashbury school of poetics, the one great sin is to show emotion. The prose poems that compose Rebecca Cook’s first book, I Will Not Give In, adhere to a very different aesthetic. 

Some of its best poems are set in childhood or early adolescence. Their disquietude stems from the constraints and consequences of a blossoming intelligence and sexual curiosity confronting the world. Many of the poems contain a rural setting, but they are far from pastoral. Take the poem, “Millie the Model”:

“The knob on the old wringer washer is a bomb. I set it carefully.… I run around the barn and I’m almost safe. But no, I blow sky high…. The blonde woman with no shirt is smiling for the camera, her breasts full as milk inside the wheat field. Her belly is curvy, her jeans cut off at the knees….”

These poems don’t try to tease meaning or nostalgia out of an idealized landscape. If anything, the backdrop of rural isolation is analogous to a personal isolation engendered by an intense and painful self-awareness. Exploring that can cause an author to devolve into self-indulgence, but I Will Not Give Over avoids this. The poems create an internal logic that builds from image to image, making them satisfyingly cohesive even when they are portraying states of emotional or intellectual disarray. Additionally, there is the overarching narrative of growing older, of coming to terms (or not) with the world’s casual cruelty. For example, in “Black,” Cook writes:

“The bull’s ball sac is like the black knob of the sock darner and you’re sick on your stomach with it, knowing she slips the rubber bands around them, knowing they dry up and fall off.... You won’t eat it… and you find out that they left it hanging too long at the meat-processing plant, your pet steer’s body draining, the boy with his water gun washing out the clots, the blood pooling on the floor, festering.”

By foregoing line breaks, Cook manages in many of the poems to create a headlong rhythm, like the breathlessness of a panic attack. By plunging forward, the poems reinforce the emotional chaos, making the form of the poems feel genuinely authentic.

A number of literary journals with a focus on cross-genre writing and indeterminate forms have started publication in the last few years. This book lands right in the middle of that collective exploration. Most of the poems have some kind of narrative to them, reading almost like “flash fiction” pieces. Others are arranged more by image rather than action, making them read more like traditional prose poems. By exploring the common linguistic area between prose poems and flash fictions, Cook expands their forms’ possibilities. Mostly, she reminds poets of the necessity for writing compelling sentences—not just compelling lines—by composing such wonderful forward-plunging sentences as the one in “Yellow”:

“He held you down so tight you couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream, couldn’t move, your mouth full of clover and it’s that you look back on, his body on yours, pressing down, his skin woven into you in that moment and sometimes you gather all that narrowing breath into your center until you’re almost there but then you’re just standing in your kitchen with the spoon between your fingers, stirring and stirring and then it stops.”

Throughout, some of the most intense pleasure emerges from reading such long, word-drunk sentences that seem to recall William Faulkner by way of Sylvia Plath or Sharon Olds. As noted earlier, the most successful poems in I Will Not Give Over are set in childhood or adolescence. Those poems have great tensions between personal innocence and worldly experience. However, they gain a different kind of intensity as the adult “I” ruminates on her place in the world and her complicity in its imperfections. For example, Cook writes in “Womb”:

“My moored womb thickens and bleeds, listening for the rattle of shells down the shoots, waiting, waiting, so full of regret I can’t stop hearing its muffled singing rising up from my middle, that echo ringing of birth, of water, of my sons’ faces slipping from me and into the world, into this terrible, available world.”

It’s that “terrible, available world” Cook does such a wonderful job of exploring. These are not poems that read as though they have had all the rough edges workshopped out of them. They are direct, vulnerable, lush; they engage all the senses. The collection is a terrific debut, one that suggests further, richer explorations to come.

Fractured Fairy Tales: A Review of Sally Rosen Kindred’s Darling Hands, Darling Tongue by Angele Ellis

cover credit: Hyacinth Girl Press

Darling Hands, Darling Tongue by Sally Rosen Kindred

Hyacinth Girl Press (2013)

Review by Angele Ellis

“My son knew that Disney does not have the last word,” said Sally Rosen Kindred in Little Patuxent Review in 2012, describing what led her to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, first published in book form in 1911. “That if a story was intriguing, there was a good chance there was a ‘real’ one out there that was even better… Only there was still so much that was missing.”

The startling, exquisitely crafted free-verse poems in Kindred’s Darling Hands, Darling Tongue supply what is missing by both reimagining and subverting Barrie’s Edwardian boy’s dream, whose simultaneously unappealing and appalling details have either been forgotten or absorbed into our Disney-saturated culture. This chapbook ventures into new territory—a world of what comes afterward, or instead—by remaking and dissecting, sometimes literally, Barrie’s classic tale. (Kindred uses Peter Pan and Wendy, a version abridged for parents and children with Barrie’s permission in 1915 by the British writer May Byron, and published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1921.)

Kindred reflects and refracts myth to reject, as Andrew Mulvania wrote in Weave Magazine of the Biblical allusions in her full-length collection No Eden (Mayapple, 2011), “the easier and overused.” In “Tinker Bell Thinks About What She Wants,” Kindred conjures a bold woman’s voice for the sprite Barrie describes as “quite a common fairy”:

....Peter,
pull me down. I want you
but wish I did not need your hands

to do my dirt work, your heavy heat to solder
or your pretty mouth to

tell me over, make me more
than a sliver of a dead child’s laugh.

Tiger Lily (whom Barrie condescendingly calls “a princess in her own right… the most beautiful of dusky Dianas”), Tinker Bell, and Wendy Darling narrate seven of the fifteen poems in Darling Hands, Darling Tongue. As Kindred’s female mythmakers—sharp, demanding, regretful, wanting out—they resonate with rebellion. Her Tiger Lily decides to leave the book altogether:

…If my lips moved in this story
we could talk.
I’ve shut your book. Just think
if my sisters and brothers were more
than a smudge on the page, than Redskins
moving in tandem, marching
in some dim

ellipse, waiting to be elected
for salvation or the Superbowl.

As for Kindred’s Tinker Bell, she not only dies—“a… bright shine of a stain” in the midst of the careless, clueless Lost Boys—but undergoes an eerily beautiful autopsy:

…her blood, gone bronze

now that it’s dried in trails
through the handful
of painted dust
we’re calling a girl:

and here,
two bones from the tongue
of a lark—
I can’t even say.

They smell like apples.
They may have been her hands.

And Kindred gives the last word to her Wendy Darling, returned to drizzling London as a wise but sorrowful adult (“Long-armed now, hard-boned / and wingless”):

… Peter once said I made that world. I lie
with it: guilt simmers my dreams, its ocean
seeps out in pain along my arms
when I wake forgetting why rain
is coming down outside
but my body by a man’s, and bone-dry.

Most poignantly, Kindred reads and rereads Peter Pan and Wendy as a narrative of the frayed but essential bond between mother and child—the endless push-pull (for both) between the need for safety and the desire for freedom and adventure, in a world that wavers between fantasy and nightmare. Nashay Jones’s richly-colored illustration for Darling Hands, Darling Tongue’s cover shows a mother stretching her arms upward toward a child who may be either returning to her or flying away, as petals—or wings—fall around them.

These ambiguities and tensions pervade the dreams of the child and adult personae Kindred employs in Darling Hands, Darling Tongue. In dreams, Kindred suggests, begin both responsibilities and escape from responsibilities. The feminist, postmodern poet can change the story and close the book, but the Lost Boys—and Lost Girls—linger in the imagination as more than ghosts or shadows. They are reminders of the fragility of the child-parent bond and of the mortality of the poet’s own child, as in the stunning “One Ending”:

Our story ends, we’re thinking,
when Mr. and Mrs. Darling
throw open all the blue-house windows
to land and adopt the Lost Boys.

[...]

That’s one ending.
There’s always another, one
with tigers red
at mouths, their soft paws smearing
the sides of the house
that is his sleeping body,
their tongues a bronze door,
this page
their wild breath at the glass.

Lyrical Calls to the Feral Spirit: A Review of Jen Karetnick's Landscaping for Wildlife by Mindy Kronenberg

cover credit: Big Wonderful Press

Landscaping for Wildlife

Jen Karetnick

Big Wonderful Press, 2012

Review by Mindy Kronenberg

Landscaping for Wildlife seeks to reconcile the forces of the natural world with human nature. It uses various poetic forms (including villanelle, pantoum, and sestina) to create observations that are rich and nearly ritualized in their music and lyricism. Jen Karetnick’s poems capture the domestic and untamable sensibility (or one could even say conceit) that resides inside us as we witness scenarios of encroachment—whether of the wild on the familiar, or vice versa.

Panic and tenderness intermingle in “Echolalia,” where a baby’s cries from colic (“Back arching, her legs point into pitchforks, / Stabbing my ribs as we rock and walk.”) are echoed by peacocks. The lines of the poem are styled as its own mirror to call back the night’s shrill events, beginning and ending with the harsh call of the birds. Fear and humor come into play in “Interview with My Son before Snorkling,” and despite visions of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel and the poet’s memory of the movie Jaws—she sees “…a dorsal tipping / every wave"—and watches as her son collects underwater treasures. It is a remarkably poignant moment, summoning the sting of parental detachment:

For brief seconds on his own he collected brain coral,
observed eels scooting under rocks, and I wondered

as all mothers wonder if this is the one I’ll be allowed
to keep, before he finned up from behind to slip into mine

his growing, shriveled hand, that once-familiar
fish swimming in the oceanic eddies of my body

“A Gesture,” like “New England Music Camp,” brings together the transformative power of nature’s pageantry and personal transformation, creating memories that are both intimate and celebratory. In the first poem, a display of dolphins acts as a backdrop to the act of handholding (“…glistening fins and clouds, / light striking on every surface, / his fingers grazed mine, / withdrew, then came shyly to rest.”).  In the second, a sensual rhythm vibrates in the landscape while a young choir sings (“In the sticky sap, / the glacial lake’s mercury / licks at rocky lips. // The groove underscored, / released by an hour’s taut / and stretch, the choir / eclipses this song—”).

An ecological conscience in world’s wilderness beset by human development pervades many of these works, maintaining an eerie beauty amidst the danger. In “Love Poem for the Purple Gallinate,” the bird of the title is heralded in its glossy, abundant environment of the glades. But it is at risk when losing its life mate, diminishing it to a stain: “and should one die, the other will too, become no more than / a freckle of sunspot like the sheen on the surface of oil.” “The Sound of Global Warming: Brief Renku with Myself” is equally haunting:

I.
Traffic rushes by
Like one thousand rivers fed
By icecaps melting.

II.
All night, Iguanas
Thud to the ground like mangos.
Inside, they’re awake.

In visions mythic and modern, concise and elaborate, Karetnick’s poems become a collective cautionary tale. They capture beauty among caveats, dazzling the reader with scenes and images that too suddenly slip from our view.

A Possible Decency: A Review of Diane Raptosh's American Amnesiac by Marc Sheehan

cover credit: Etruscan Press

American Amnesiac by Diane Raptosh
Etruscan Press (2013)

Reviewed by Marc Sheehan

Over the past several months, the United States (or parts of it, at least) has crossed a number of sociological, political, and historical divides—think marriage equality legislation and marijuana legalization, for starters. However, for me, two events stand out: the re-election of President Barack Obama and the death of noted poet and feminist Adrienne Rich. What the two have in common is that they both rose to the top of their respective paths without the support of—and even the active opposition of—white males. Rich’s power and recognition grew as the power of white males in the United States declined, and President Obama won both his national elections without support from the majority of white males.

Enter American Amnesiac, Diane Raptosh’s wonderful, ambitious, and timely book of poems that was recently a National Book Award nominee. At the center of American Amnesiac is Calvin Rinehart, a former financier (“I plumped / for Goldman Sachs) from Denver who wakes up with amnesia. In an act of self-reinvention, Rinehart adopts the generic name John Doe, which he has been given by the authorities, the media, and the denizens of the blogosphere:

                                        Bloggers from across the world
predict What ‘happened’ to Cal Rinehart will become widespread

if ID cards fall into currency: round-the-globe government-controlled
            DNA database hubs. A mug’s game! A blunt kick in the khakis!

In these poems, Rinehart/Doe spends as much time and emotional energy piecing together the world around him as he does trying to reconstruct his past. Culture, Rinehart/Doe discovers, both liberates us from ourselves and imprisons us in its expectations:

                                                                 We can’t
ask what we are without asking when, within which mixes, how

weighted, and who’s strung up in we.

Raptosh gives her character a Hobson’s choice: He can either remain untethered from a culture that gave him privilege at the expense of others, or he can re-enter that culture and forgo the redemption he found through having his memory erased. Or maybe there’s a third choice: take the best of the past, jettison the rest, and move forward. Raptosh’s white male protagonist combines longing, regret, remorse, self-discovery, and reinvention in just the right proportions. Of course, it is ironic that Rinehart/Doe has the ability to start over precisely because he is a white male of means, a status which he tries to renounce.

Most of American Amnesiac is written in a loose form of the ghazal—a traditional Arabian/Persian poetic form Rich also explored in her “Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib.” In Raptosh’s hand, the form becomes more narrative and the associative leaps—for which the form is known—stretch further across the couplets, creating a tug between epiphany and narrative. Although, sometimes, the juxtapositions appear faster and put Doe’s predicament into sharper focus:

I recall the end of Rinehart’s last consulting phase
as if it were Lisette’s first look.

At each momentous stage of his life, a Sioux Indian earns a new name.
Jumping Badger landed the tag Sitting Bull on killing his first bison.

Unfriend was just dubbed word of the year.
The name’s John Doe, and I’m just lying doggo here on wheezing earth.

When Adrienne Rich won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1951, few people felt the United States was on the path of becoming a country that would embrace marriage equality and an African American president. What these poems do best is to synthesize our experience—both intellectually and emotionally—and try to make sense out of the cacophony. Like Rich, Raptosh sees a changed world, and the poems in American Amnesiac point with a “spine of possible decency” toward it.

Writing the Rhythms of Our Lives: A Review of Margo Taft Stever's The Hudson Line by Mindy Kronenberg

cover credit: Main Street Rag Publishing

The Hudson Line by Margo Taft Stever
Main Street Rag Publishing Company (2012)

Review by Mindy Kronenberg

The passing of Irish poet Seamus Heaney has sparked numerous conversations, in both print and on the Internet, of how his work’s significance was due in part to its strong connection to the lives of determined and vulnerable citizens. He was described as a poet who capably expressed “the rhythms of ordinary lives,” by delving beneath domestic pantomime and finding an inner darkness or hope. Similarly, Margo Taft Stever’s The Hudson Line summons the stories of citizens along the route of a suburban commuter train—privilege providing little protection from the chaos that enters lives without warning. It is a haunting ride filled with longing, rage, fear, and a determination to find the right words to share the stories of one’s life.

Stever’s characters and scenarios are startling and evocative, capable of rousing panic while they plumb the emotional interiors of pending violence. Like parables, they are partly reportage and partly out of time, nearly magical in their lyrical narratives. For example, in a scene of marital carnage, a wife is driven to murder to protect her children. With chilling intimacy, she is transformed (“Splitting Wood”):

The wild moon foamed at the mouth.
The wild moon crept softly at her feet.

The arms that grabbed the ax
were not her own,
that hugged it to her heart

while he slept were not hers,
the cold blade sinking in his skin.

In “House Raising,” the vestiges of rigorous indoor children’s play result in a furious husband admonishing his wife. Her recollection of the children’s games becomes metaphorical for how creating a homestead (“…houses out of cushions, / intricate cities and roads / out of rugs and blocks,…”) can dissolve into stains and frayed remnants underfoot.

“The Worst Mother” and “Step-Mother” play upon fairy tale perceptions of failure and fright in the maternal dynamic. The first lists affectionate ritual (“Playing music / for you before / you were born,...”) and the suffering of a child’s illness (“The night you gagged / and choked up shreds… / I comforted you). The latter poem unleashes a litany of brutal powers (“The step-mother’s fangs lengthen / in moonlight.”) as well as the curse of circumstance (“A step-mother is always evil, / marked by the blood of her husband’s children. / She tries to climb into the other’s shoes).

Stever captures the complexity of what dwells beneath even the most cantankerous or hardened persona. In “Beulah Reid,” the “cruel nanny” taunts her charges with the sticks the children find outside (“Some are blunt, others sharp, / spring loaded. You twist them before us.”). She hisses at them “with damnation” and is reduced to an old broken woman with “…stocking pulled down over ankles, the corridors of your bulging / legs, your jutting veins…” who seeks the sedate strains of an old television show for elderly viewers. In an instant, the harridan is anyone’s aunt or grandmother, another transformation that mingles poignancy with pain.

The Hudson Line mixes cautionary tales with those of wonder and persistence (“The Quickening,” “Why So Many Poets Come from Ohio,” “Queen City”), and ignites the live wires of what ultimately makes us human. It is a testament to the poet’s empathy and grace, capturing the resilience and terrors of seemingly ordinary people.

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Synesthetic Repast: A Review of Katherine Rauk's Basil by Mindy Kronenberg

cover credit: Black Lawrence Press

Basil by Katharine Rauk
Black Lawrence Press (2011)

Review by Mindy Kronenberg

There is a clever sort of alchemy at work in the poems in Basil, Katharine Rauk’s poetry chapbook. These thirty-one oddly compelling and challenging poems emerge as collective parables that, taken together, form a surreal, spiritual, and sensual guide to this and the next life.

Some poems combine prose and poetry narrative formats, transitioning between exterior and interior events, creating an effect of guided dreaming. For example, in “Suicide Rates Spike Near High Voltage Power Lines,” we meet a woman who knew “the metal switchbox outside her apartment window… was the very voice box of God,” and “ …felt God’s voice thrum around the rims of teacups, pulse along the floorboards’ crease.” As she lies on her bed awaiting her reward, the story breaks from prose into stanza, and the narrative distills into electrified testimony: [She felt]

God’s voice
sizzle in her teeth, she felt
God’s voice surge
down the wire
of her spine, and
God’s voice gather
in the satellite
saucers of her knees…

Rauk uses the same split in “Heartbone (I),” this time in the form of a wistful reverie, a poetic escape amidst a meal with repellent company. She has the ability to create micro-dramas with minimal context but tremendous tension, maintaining a visceral connection to the human dynamic in its many guises.

There are startling transitions in poems with such concrete titles as “Blood Orange,” “Basil,” and “After Cooking with Turmeric.” Each encounter is a journey that transcends culinary expectations. In the first, the poet asks: “Is this a fruit, / a wound, a lover?” In the last, an act of intimacy is savored as a synesthetic repast: “Now / we are opening / vaulted windows / to a sunlight of bees, / a thousand burnished / throats.”

Ultimately, there is a great deal of longing in the poems in Basil, desire entwining with ambiguity, seeking reason or redemption. In “Vignette,” enchantment and superstition take hold in a ritual for a woman wishing for motherhood. Rauk writes, “…so she tied a cucumber to her waist. // Cucumber vines crept beyond / the edges of the garden plot / like sticky fingers swiping from the sweet jar.” In “Heartbone II,” the poet/narrator seeks discovery in the intricate parts of herself—“My nub, my sweetness, my buried / bruise. My blue note and knotted / fruit stone, my blood knocking at the edge / of known…” By presenting an inventory of tactile and temporal elements (“root bits and flesh / snips, snarls of hair that won’t let loose. Made of loss, made of juice…”), she wonders if her own personhood will fully emerge among the sum of her parts. This speaks to the poet’s earnest process in each work in Basil, a hunt for the self within the confounding yet comforting sensory-tangled world.