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Against the Death Drive: Queer Joy in Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities | Craft Essay by Dana Alsamsam

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In Jericho Brown’s introduction to Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, he aptly describes the collection and the speaker as “obsessive and curious,” filled with “humor,” “comic delight” and “a sense of wonder.” For poetry, these terms of praise don’t seem out of the ordinary but for poetry by a queer author that consistently and openly takes on queerness as a subject of inquiry, this description is not what we would expect. In the introduction to Michael Snediker’s Queer Optimism he says, “Melancholy, self-shattering, shame, the death drive…this queer pessimistic constellation—nonetheless have dominated and organized much of queer-theoretical discourse…Queer theory’s analyses of negative affect and ontological instability have been and continue to be both generous and generative” (Snediker, 4). He goes on to outline his project as clearing a similar space for inquiry into queer optimism. In this passage Snediker essentially says that queer theorists and critics of queer poetry have long concentrated on suffering. I will add that often the poetry about the queer experience itself, not just critique of it, has remained boxed into this category of suffering due to its conception as a culturally acceptable queer narrative. Chen Chen’s work pushes back against this in many ways. Brown goes on to say about Chen, “he won’t be satisfied with any answer until he has thoroughly reviewed every possibility, every option for becoming a more whole self…” In this lies a deep sense of optimism. The queer author who has struggled with family and society throughout his life still has the capacity for hope, and for becoming. Melancholy in this collection is not a permanent staple of queer experience, nor is it a staple of the poet’s identity. Though his struggle with strict homophobic parents shapes a good amount of subject matter, it is often presented with humor, wonder, or a vulnerable sense of reflection which leads to growth and becoming. This extends beyond a brief moment of joy or pleasure among misery and melancholy. Chen Chen’s work supports Snediker’s project of queer optimism in that the sense of humor, wonder, and curiosity are patient and sustained in the voice of the entire collection.

In speaking about this gap in critical work, Snediker says, “Hope is promissory; hope is a horizon. Shame, on the other hand, occurs in a lavish present tense. What if the field of queer optimism were situated as firmly in the present tense as shame? Even as scholarship on shame may arise out of generosity and hopefulness, this work, within queer theory and affect theory, provides shame all the more eloquent and vibrant a vocabulary, while leaving positive affect (itself lexically impoverished) to fend for itself” (Snediker, 16). Essentially, Snediker focuses on studying optimism in the present tense, not as a possibility, but as an actual occurrence in the moment that is as intelligible and as apt for analysis as shame or pessimism. He finds essential to his argument the “separability from the promissory” of queer optimism. In other words, he works against the idea that all queer optimism is not worth studying because it is only and always in the future and therefor fleeting and unintelligible. I will agree with Snediker to the extent that it is important to study optimism and its persistence with as much critical rigor as is used to study pessimism and its seeming permanence in the queer experience. I will disagree slightly or go further to show how Chen Chen’s collection shows promissory queer optimism as a rich sight for critical investigation as well. As is signified by the very title of the collection, the speaker of these poems is filled with hope and a desire for fulfillment despite struggle and sadness. Even though Chen’s optimism often relies on a future, or a promise of a future—this drives the sense of humor, wonder, curiosity, and what I will call the “life drive” of the poems on the level of content and language. Essentially, suffering is very present in this collection but it never leads to pessimism, it instead leads to motivation to live better, more fully, and with more love. The very idea that a future is possible is what makes the poetry and the speaker consistently and patiently optimistic. I will propose that Chen Chen’s collection is subversive in that it posits queer optimism as a consistent force and not the outlier, even though it is attached to a future and always intrinsically connected to suffering.

When discussing Emily Dickinson’s poetry through the lens of his queer optimistic project, Snediker says, “Dickinson’s understanding of happiness is inseparable from happiness’s encroachment on pain. Dickinsonian happiness and pain, however, are not simply antonymous. That is, they do not replicate the unproductive yin-yang of happy/sad, whereby one can’t have the former without the latter, or vice versa” (Snediker, 95-96). Essentially, Snediker’s queer optimistic reading of Dickinson relies on the idea that happiness doesn’t have to exist as solely the opposite of pain. In his reading, Dickinson often uses pains temporal qualities such as patience and persistence to describe happiness in unexpected ways. Chen Chen’s poetry is similarly illuminated when we accept that an understanding of the joy and wonder in the work is not separable from the speaker’s experiences of suffering. To place these things on a binary is to overly simplify them, and to, as Snediker mentions many critics have done, ignore the happiness in the equation because it seems obvious.

In the beginning of When I Grow Up…, before even the first section, there is a poem called “Self-Portrait as So Much Potential” that immediately invokes these ideas in simple lines with lots of white space. It begins, “Dreaming of one day being as fearless as a mango” (13). This line at once mourns the speaker’s lack of fearlessness and invokes hope and a drive towards the future where this is possibility. Later in the piece the speaker says, “I am not the heterosexual neat freak my mother raised me to be. / I am a gay sipper, & my mother has placed what’s left of her hope on my brothers” (13). On first read, this is heartbreaking. The speaker feels that he has let down his mother and has been rejected from a family of “beautiful sons.” Why, then, does this line invoke laughter and lightness? The term “heterosexual neat freak” makes fun of heterosexuality, showing that the speaker is comfortable with his own identity to a certain extent. Additionally, the internal rhyme of “neat freak,” me,” and “be” is sonically delightful making this line roll easily off the tongue and feel almost bouncy. The second line makes a similar move with the internal rhyme of “sipper,” “mother,” and “brother.” Though the content of the lines is one of suffering, the comedic tone and sonic pleasure invoke a feeling of hope and uplifting.

Even in pieces that are filled with solemn and mourning, the poet is sure to pick us up. In “How I Became Sagacious,” a poem that details leaving home because of the lack of acceptance, he says “I wished for a place big enough for grief, / & all I got was more grief, plus People magazine” (28). This poem holds a deep hopelessness in content but we never forget the humanity of the speaker—even in the darkest moments, he finds the smallest things to live for, and offers readers a bit of light. This comedic tone comes in and out of the collection but is almost always used to relay moments of struggle, or to show a reflective speaker who has lived through and can now add humor to experiences of struggle. The short poem “Summer Was Forever” uses this same move in the lines “My parents said: Doctor, / married to lawyer. The faucet said: Drip, drop, / your life sucks” (19). The pressure from the parents is exemplary of the child of immigrant’s experience. The speaker, however, doesn’t quite fit the image of who his parents want him to be. Even in this piece which is clearly from the perspective of the speaker’s younger self, he already knows that he won’t fulfill this ideal set out for him. This line is immediately followed by the faucet telling the speaker “your life sucks.” This follows the above-mentioned comedic lightness of struggle but it also shows a mature speaker in the present reflecting and even making fun of this past self that was so steeped in tragedy. Because of this “I now” verses “I then” duality, we understand as readers that the speaker has made it through this struggle and come out not just unscathed but with a sense of humor and reflection.

This poem goes beyond the pairing of comedy with suffering to exemplify the kind of queer joy that is so powerfully optimistic. Retuning to Michael Snediker, he argues that in queer theory about poetry typically dismiss optimistic emotions like happiness and merriment because of their nature as evanescent. In his reading of Dickinson, he shows that the happiness should be attended to critically because the emotion can be formalized and prolonged just like pain: “So patient—like a pain, Patience is what renders the smile anomalous, by granting it (less an afterlife than) a life that exceeds the sudden break by which smiles ordinarily are known” (Snediker, 107). In other words, he finds Dickinsonian joy worth attending to critically through queer optimism because of its unusual quality of temporal longitude which works against usual ideas of optimism as passionate and not worthy of study. This is not the only premise on which Snediker argues for the critical study of optimism in queer poetry, but the temporal argument is prevalent. One of his primary arguments as mentioned previously is for studying an optimism which is not futurally oriented or promissory in nature. I will show in contrast that Chen Chen’s collection uses a joy that is passionate and fleeting, and often futurally oriented, but which is still a valid site for critical inquiry. For these poems that contain the wonder and curiosity of a child even when they are inhabited by an adult speaker, the future and its possibilities for queer love and joy are what allow the speaker to be optimistic of a better future and fuller self. The fleeting, passionate, and sometimes waxing violent moments of the collection are what lead to the speaker’s sustained and consistent life drive.

To continue with “Summer Was Forever, the poem turns when the speaker speaks about seeing the “local paper boy on his route” and begins showing what we understand to be his regular fantasies about this boy from afar. As the imagery spirals into the imagination it becomes a whirlwind of passion:

…I knew: we would be so terribly
happy. Our work would be simple. Our kissing would rhyme
with cardiac arrest. Birds would overthrow the cathedral towers.
I would have a magician’s hair, full of sleeves & saws,
unashamed to tell the whole town our first date was
in a leaky faucet factory. How we fell in love during jumps
on his tragic uncle’s trampoline. We fell in love in midair.

To begin, this whole section is in the future conditional, using “would” before the verbs. This construction shows that the speaker has a strong desire and hope for passion and love. He imagines a future in which this kind of love is possible. As the poem goes on, the “would” construction is dropped in “How we fell in love during jumps…” and finally the absolute of “We fell in love in midair.” This shows the imaginary as it comes true for the speaker and the love becomes a reality. The poem ends here on this light and optimistic note. The speaker and his lover are literally in midair, so light from love they fly off the page at the end of the poem. We hardly recall the beginning of the short poem where the speaker was feeling pressured and inadequate. The imagery that surrounds the pleasure in this piece also takes on an interesting pairing of pleasure with violence, almost as if the passion tips over into violence at its most intense. This dichotomy is set up with “terribly / happy.” Especially because it extends over a line break, the terrible nature of this happiness is emphasized. Then, the kissing rhymes with a lethal attack; the passion is so intense that it can kill. Birds a small, pleasant animal associated with song and spring, destroys cathedrals. Then we have the image of “saws” and a “tragic…trampoline.” This imagery of violence so closely associated with passion shows that this joy is fleeting and would usually be deemed not worthy of study. As previously shown, this joy is clearly related to a future-oriented promise because the experience here is an imagined one. In other words, the joy in this poem goes against all the traits that Snediker uses to deem Dickinsonian joy worthy of study. This joy is worthy of study for queer optimism, though, because the hope and drive for love and passion are what bring the speaker out of struggle. He no longer hears the faucet saying “your life sucks,” in favor of his fantasized love. Though the joy is not temporally sound, it is worthy of investigation as queer optimism because it moves the speaker through sadness and into hope.

Some of the poems do show joy in a specific present moment, and though these moments are not dependent on a future, they still act the same way. These moments of joy are what bring the speaker out of suffering and lead him to a maintain optimism. He addresses this idea himself in a poem titled “Poem” when he says, “Racked by doubt, but not yet / wrecked by it…” and later, “…doubled over / by dour, but not yet / doomed to it, I mope with / some hope, desperately open” (52). Even in doubt and dour the speaker self acknowledges that he is “desperately open” to any possibility of hope and happiness. In this poem, his desire to live fully is so strong that he becomes uninterested in death as a concept. Towards the end he says, “I / don’t want to know / how the book ends, / that the book ends…” This lack of desire to see the end of something shows a grounded voice of the present moment and its joys as well as a drive to live a full and joyful life. The poem ends with the speaker thinking that he should call his mother and ask her about her garden. The suffering and death that is ever present push the speaker to moments of joy and ensuring that he takes all possibilities to live fully.

It’s particularly impressive how the collection accomplishes this in poems that are overtly about sadness or tragedy and are yet, somehow, still optimistic. The poem “Elegy for My Sadness,” appears somber from the title itself. The elegiac nature of the piece implies a death and the poem is about the speaker’s sadness. When we look a bit closer, however, we see that if the poem is an elegy for sadness, sadness must be what has died. Chen writes, “I want to be a sweetheart in every moment, / full of goats & xylophones, as charming / as a hill with a small village on it. / I want to be a village full of sweethearts…” The construction of “I want,” though implying a quality that the speaker does not currently have, shows a drive towards a fuller self and a better future. Even in the deep throes of sadness, the speaker is capable of imagining a future where this is not the case. There is also the element of humor and sonic pleasure in these lines with “goats & xylophones.” The selection is strange and delightful and the internal rhyme emphasizes a bouncy quality. The poem goes on to show how the speaker’s lover comforts and supports the speaker in these moments of sadness. The love he is given makes him examine his own sadness: “You are just / in the same room with me & my unsweet, / uncharming, completely / uninteresting sadness” (37). These lines are particularly interesting because critical work on queer poetry, and queer poetry itself has often focused on and created robust arguments around sadness. As Snediker explains in his introduction, queer suffering already has a wide vocabulary and theory around it; it is joy and optimism that are deprived of this same critical thought. This moment, through this lens, reads as subversive. Chen essentially says that sadness is boring and chooses instead to focus on the intricacy and fullness of love.

This melancholy is not a permanent fixture of the speaker’s experience, nor of his identity, and he certainly doesn’t want it to be. The poem ends:

I wish I could write an elegy for my sadness
because it has suddenly died. I wish I could mourn it
by kissing you again & again while neither of us
can stop laughing, a kind of kiss where we sometimes
miss the mouth altogether, a kind of kiss
I think every single dead person
in every part of the world must crave
with violent impossibility.

Although in the moment this is said, the speaker is still very much inside of their sadness, the piece does not focus on that. Instead it takes on a vocabulary of desire with “I wish” structuring the beginning of the sentences. This sense of desire shows that the speaker is more interested in love and pleasure than in his own sadness. He craves a future where sadness can be pushed aside in favor of kissing and laughing. The choice to make “every single dead person” the subject towards the end is interesting. The poem itself is an elegy, but not for a person. Here we see a similar move that was made in “Poem,” where contemplating death turns the speaker to a distinct desire for life, a strong resistance to death without having lived fully. The speaker here doesn’t want to waste time on sadness when there is love being given to him. He imagines that the dead crave the kind of love he has right in front of him and this leads him to crave living more fully in the moment. The way this poem ends also enacts the hope for the future that the speaker has. Though the speaker is still experiencing sadness, the poem is structured so that it ends on love and happiness, even if it’s only a possibility. The reader is left with the lightness of a kiss where the speaker and his lover “miss the mouth altogether.” This structure privileges joy as the poem effectively “kills” the speaker’s sadness with an outburst of love. In another poem concerning death, “If I Should Die Tomorrow,” the speaker does not enact the archetypical motions of regret. Instead he speaks about what he will miss. The poems speaks about the pleasure of language and the pleasure of the body. Merely thinking about the possibility of no longer experiencing these pleasures, drives the speaker towards life and full living.

            It’s clear through these pieces that suffering and sadness are not removed from the picture in order to convey a consistent feeling of optimism. In fact, suffering and sadness are often starting points for these pieces, grounding them in the queer experience of being cast out by family or society. This suffering and sadness, however, never translates into pessimism. The speaker of these poems himself finds sadness and loneliness unproductive and trades them in for love, joy, and pleasure whenever possible. He says, “I am making my loneliness small. So small it fits on a postcard / a baby rabbit could eat” (24). He never avoids talking about negative emotions. He instead acknowledges them as true and uses wonder, curiosity, and desire for love to create a consistent optimism, to reach for an answer or many answers to his questions of being and becoming. In attending to the joy of this collection, even if it’s difficult because it is fleeting and passionate, I’ve found a fuller reading of what is possible in both the queer experience and in poetry. The capacity to study joy as fully as we’ve studied suffering can make way for more joy, for more queer poets and critics of queer poetry to engage with joy seriously, for it not to be written off as easy or obvious. When so much of the queer experience and queer poetry has been based off of melancholy and suffering, and when the path towards joy is rocky and uncertain, how can we call joy obvious or easy?

Chen Chen writes for his younger self, as well other young queer people who might never have seen any representations of queer happiness, who might need to see the possibility of joy to keep going. In this way, the work of looking at queer joy closely and rigorously is one of activism, of clearing a valid space for this kind of work and the positive impact it has. I’ll conclude with a quote from Chen Chen when asked what advice he has for young queer people who are struggling: “It’s important to say: your heartbreak is real. There is nothing wrong with you if you continue to feel heartbroken. Your emotions, including your sorrows, are real. Always. In my book, there is no “happy ending” to the conflicts between unaccepting, homophobic parents and a queer son. The lack of reconciliation is my reality. Maybe that’s your reality, too. You are still amazing and if you’ve had to make the choice—for your own safety and health—to cut off communication with family members, I see you, too. I love you, too.”

Works Cited

Chen, Chen. When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. BOA Editions, 2017.
Snediker, Michael D. Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Dana Alsamsam is the author of a chapbook, (in)habit (tenderness lit, 2018), and her poems are published or forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, The Shallow Ends, Gigantic Sequins, Tinderbox Poetry, Salamander, BOOTH, The Common and others. Critical prose appears in The Rumpus. Her work has been supported by a fellowship from Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.

The Wild Feminine: Five poems by Ada Limón | Craft Essay by Dion O’Reilly

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In the Christian myth, Adam names the animals. In “A Name,” the first poem of Ada Limón’s most recent collection, The Carrying, she remakes Eden. In Limón’s version, Eve names the creatures, making one wonder if in this Genesis, Eve is the first-born human, the maker of Adam.

When Eve walked among
the animals and named them—
nightingale, red-shouldered hawk,
fiddler crab, fallow deer—
I wonder if she ever wanted
them to speak back, looked into
their wide wonderful eyes and
whispered, Name me, Name me.

“A Name,” sets a high bar for the The Carrying by rewriting the Judeo-Christian narrative, claiming the woman as Namer. Moreover, the speaker wonders if the original woman “looked into/their wide wonderful eyes/ and whispered, Name me Name me.” This re-imagining not only transfers the power to Eve, but also shows how differently a woman might claim the world: not as an object on which to impose meaning, but rather as a source of meaning and identity. This poem, which turns Christian ideology on its head, is not heavy-handed in its feminist slant. It is not resolute, does not chant a received wisdom. It is important to note that the speaker “wonders” if Eve “wanted” the animals to “speak back.” Limón poses a question. Indeed, her question is rather magical and not a little plaintive. We sense the desire for this female bond with the wild. We allow that her need might be enough to inspire such a bond, while the repetition — Name me, Name me— implies an unfulfilled longing. 

This feminine ability to derive power from animals is unabashedly clear in the opening poem of Bright Dead Things. The Pushcart winner, “How to Triumph Like a Girl,” is a playful celebration of womanhood. The first line is disarming, initially characterizing the mares un-feministically as “lady horses”—  ladylike and prancy, not at all your stereotypical leaders.

I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. ears up, girls. ears up!
but mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
Summer inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.

As the poem moves along, we begin to discern the power of these “lady horses.” They have “swagger, after winning.” Then the weird and fascinating turn; the speaker feels an identification with the beasts because of their shared gender. Once again, the poem’s second volta asks a question: “Don’t you want to believe it?/Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see/the huge beating genius machine/that thinks, no, it knows,/it’s going to come in first.” This poem is a fun “Imagine” song, a kind of “I have a dream” manifesto, but with a subtle stratum. Limón’s speaker doesn’t ask the reader to believe a woman can be as powerful as a racehorse; she asks the reader if she might “want to believe it”—  a nudge, a baby step. Furthermore the question is framed in a transgressive manner, asking if the narrator could reveal her breasts (the source of human nurturance and nutrition) and instead of an offense or party prank, it might be proof of power and “genius.” Moreover, consider how she imparts “genius” to the heart, the organ conventionally associated with feelings— as if to imply feelings are possessed of their own intuitive knowledge.

In the April 2019 Writer’s Chronicle interview, Limón remarks that “there are two snakes in a poem, and in the end, one snake has to win…on some level one of the many underlying forces of the poem has to prevail…People are scared to make a choice or they feel like they want to embrace the mess and craziness of it, which is awesome, but in doing so sometimes they dilute [the ending of the poem].”  In much of Limón’s work, it is the feminine wild that prevails. Many of her poems deal with loss— death of the planet, death of family members, death of the conventional dream of being a mother. That “snake” of loss is often entwined with the competing snake of wild femaleness or with the pure beauty of the natural world. Inevitably the feral feminine wins. The choice is made. Sometimes, it is purely nature that prevails, but there are enough poems like the ones cited above to establish a strong connection between the feminine and the wild as a balm.

Take “Service,” from Bright Dead Things, in which the speaker is “fed up” with her traveling companion whom we take to be her boyfriend or husband: the speaker is not enjoying his objectification of his ex-girlfriend’s beauty. The speaker re-establishes her resonance with the physicality of a racehorse and then sets out to find her satisfaction in yet another animalistic bond:

Somewhere outside of Albuquerque, I was all
fed up with the stories about your ex girlfriend’s
Guess billboard in New York City, and to make
matters worse, I had to pee like a racehorse, or
like a girl who’d had too much to drink way
too far away from home. You stopped at a friend’s
body shop to talk about a buddy who was stuck
some place in Mexico. You were talking, pulling
strings and taking pulls off a brown bottle, and no
one told me where the restroom was, so I walked
back to where the hot rods were displayed like dogs
ready for a fight, baring their grills like teeth.
I was hungry, the air smelled like hot gasoline
and that sweet carnation smell of oil and coolant.
A girl pitbull came and circled me as I circled
the cars; she sniffed my ankles like I was her kin
or on some kind of rescue mission. You were still
talking, not a glance in the direction of me
and the bitch working our ways around
the souped-up Corvettes and the power tools.
The pet was glossy, well cared for, a queen
of the car shop, and when she widened
her hind legs and squatted to pee all over
one of the cars’ dropped canvases. I took it
as a challenge. That strong yellow stream seemed
to be saying, Girl, no one’s going to tell me
when to take a leak, when to bow down,
when not to bite. So, right then, in the dim lights
of the strange garage, I  lifted my skirt and pissed
like the hard bitch I was.

Again, Limón is asking a question: Why are females dismissed and ignored— relegated to the junk heap. Why is the term bitch derogatory when female dogs are loyal, protective, smart, and strong— like “a queen?” The speaker feels marginalized and ignored until she identifies with the powerful pitbull bitch and transgressively defines her territory by pissing in the junk. The speaker is far from home in an environment that is not helpful or friendly. The snake of oppression and alienation is conquered by the snake of animalistic female empowerment. Limón makes a clear (and humorous) choice, claiming to be a “hard bitch,’ and that’s why the resolution is so strong.

In The Carrying, Limón grapples with her fruitless attempts to conceive and what that means for a woman. In the final analysis, nature reconciles the speaker’s ambivalence and mediates the loss. In the last poem “Sparrow, What Did You Say?,” the narrator— who has spent a quiet day gardening— contemplates what her life would be like if she were capable of giving birth. She decides “I’m good at this, this being alone/in the world, the watching of things/growing, this older me…who spent an hour trying to figure out that the bird/with a three-note descending call/is just a sparrow.” She goes on to question what her life would be like if she had a child, would she “selfishly demand this day/back, a full untethered day trying/to figure out what bird was calling me/and why.” As usual, Limón asks the question without imposing an answer. It is clear the path for this speaker is to listen to the wild and pursue what she hears. This poem is not only a tribute to the redemptive power of nature, but also an ars poetica. The speaker, in the final analysis, re-dedicates herself to listening to the natural world and figuring out what to say about it. That process becomes her generative act.

Sometimes, without reference to distinctly feminist issues, the untouched landscape releases the living from pain or bondage. In “The Long Ride,” a doomed horse is a stand-in for the universal anguish of misdeeds and regret. The horse is identified with civilization, the city, and its discontents. The open pastures of Montana become the balm for human sin.

Ma’s in the wind-pummeled double-wide
waiting for the retired policeman
to bring the retired police horses
to the ranch. She’s at the window now
describing the rain, the two-horse trailer,
and also, how sometimes she and my stepdad
talk about death for a long time.
How imagining death can make it easier
to live and I agree and say, It’s called die
before you die. What is being delivered
here is a horse who’s had a hard life.
A large quarter horse named Seattle—
a horse with a city-name who protected a city,
who was spooked outside the baseball stadium
what a shopping bag wrapped around his leg,
a plastic thing versus a muscle-bound animal
in a busy crowd and a flash accident killed
a man. But then, I wonder, what for the horse?
Never to be ridden, stuck numb in a stall,
lightning bugs torturing the poor blood?
I bet that horse might have wanted to
died before he died. But not yet.
What is  what is being delivered here is release.
Today, his officer writer is finally retired too,
with an old badge on the dashboard
and a fine plan to drive all the way to Montana,
where the writer has bought a ranch for his horse,
Seattle. The rider and his horse, with his city name,
and his forgiven city mistakes, are charting
a clear new territory of absolution, and it makes
Ma and me happy. How good it is to love
live things, even when what they’ve done
is terrible, how much we each want to be
the pure exonerated creature, to be turned loose
into our own wide open without a single
harness of sin to stop us.

The wild and the love of the wild prevail in this poem as they do in most of Limón’s work. Characteristically, there is no minimizing of earthly pain and suffering; pain is a strong, vivid, writhing snake throughout, but ultimately, healing imagery of the “wide open” end the poems with satisfaction. Limón chooses the snake of love, redemption, and the natural order.

On her Blogspot, Limón states “I think it might be harder for men to talk about their feelings, but when they do, we think they are being brave.” She goes on to discuss what it was like for her to be frank about her feelings:

I wasn’t just anxious. I was white-knuckling-for-the-take-off scared. For me, [Bright Dead Things] is the most personal book of poems yet. It’s raw in a way that I’m not used to; I don’t mean unfinished, I mean, “open.” Though the previous books of poems are certainly me, and expose all parts of me within them, this one doesn’t hide under anything. For starters, the poems never (or very rarely) change tense [sic]—the “I” in these poems is “ME.” I remember, while I was writing some of these poems, saying to myself, “Okay, what’s the poem you are scared to write?” and then trying to write it. I did this over and over again.

I would contend that Limón’s resolute commitment to choosing her snakes— revealing her feelings about loss, pain, womanhood, and nature— is a courageous choice, a revealing and vulnerable choice. Maybe, ultimately that’s what makes her poems both strongly female and also strong: she evinces the courage to open up, to deliver wildly-honest poems— to take a tough stand with finesse and craft, to be the “hard bitch” that she is and own it.

Works Cited

Buckton, Lisa. “Naming the Animal: Am Interview with Ada Limon.” The Writer’s Chronicle, vol. 51, no. 5, Apr. 2019, pp. 16-24.

Limon, Ada. The Carrying: Poems. Milkweed Editions, 2020.

Limón, Ada “Starting with A: On Art & Anxiety” Ada Limón. www. Adalimon.blogspot.com. Accessed 11 March 2019

Limón Ada. Bright Dead Things. Milkweed Editions, 2015.

The Holy Bible: King James Version. Dallas, TX: Brown Books Publishing, 2004.

Dion O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Bellingham Review, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, and a variety of other literary journals and anthologies, including an upcoming Lambda Literary Anthology. Her work has been nominated for Pushcarts, the Intro Journals Project, and was sent to the judges for the Folio Literary Journal Poetry Contest and her first manuscript, Ghost Dog, was a finalist for the Catamaran Book Prize.

Current: An Interview with Rebecca Morgan Frank About Her 2017 Collection Sometimes We’re All Living in A Foreign Country | by Allison Pitinii Davis

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Rebecca Morgan Frank published her collection, Sometimes We’re All Living in A Foreign Country, with Carnegie Mellon University Press in October 2017. It is available for purchase here.

APD: The language of childhood rhymes echo through the opening of the collection. In “Parable of a First Born,” sisters chant jump rope rhymes before relocation reduces them to strangers. In “Crawfish Chorus,” the language of nursery rhymes meets lyric word play: “Crawfish, crawfish,/Mary caught a dogfish./Dog face, dog race…” How are these rhymes operating in the collection’s larger examination of identity and place? Did their sonic qualities influence how you approached form and sound throughout the collection?

RMF: I always follow my ear when I write–the music carries me into whatever it is I am trying to explore in the poem. Some of the music of this book was shaped by the sounds around me, such as the train horns that blared all night just yards away from my old loft above an antique store in downtown Hattiesburg, MS. But the music also comes from what I’m reading, and while I was teaching at the University of Southern Mississippi, I came across a fascinating book on jump rope rhymes in the library stacks. Reading those rhymes, and especially reading them aloud with my students to help them learn about meter and rhyme, brought back the early pleasures, and playfulness, of poetry that I first encountered as a child in Virginia. Because I was teaching graduate poetic forms courses over the years I wrote this collection, I was reading a lot of both published and student work that was rich with distinctive meters and rhyme. I am hard of hearing, so I am often drawn to more obvious sounds, the sounds I can identify and follow: the clarity of the chanting song of a jump rope rhyme, for example, makes it into my world. I am also interested in the way places have their own rhythms shaped by the way people speak, sing, listen.

APD: The collection is full of cataloging, and the lists often depict the lost, castoff, or forgotten. The collection opens with “Pawn Shop,” where the speaker is seated “at the boxy and floral pianoforte,/surrounded by shoestrings, an old leg bone,/a cracked Grecian urn.” The list compresses time, space, and the history poetry—the urn calls back to Keats calling back to ancient Greece. “Fishing Tackle and Fine Wines” begins “That’s the sort of city it was. You could find/everything you wouldn’t want within a block.” The collection thrusts these castoff relics into center stage and forces the reader to grapple with the histories of what we’ve left behind. I’m interested in how the collection casts these everyday objects in a new light that makes the familiar feel new. Can you talk more about the relationship between the castoff objects and the collection’s tension between the familiar and foreign? Formally, how did these lists of objects influence the construction of the poems?

RMF: I’m fascinated with how the wear on objects is the mark of the life of someone else: objects become temporal through their wear or decay, and thus as images, they can convey the passage of time. When I return to certain parts of the South, I can see the presence of the past, and of the passage of time, in material ways. The cluttered antique shops, the crumbling gas stations, the old malls that have long been demolished other places: the past is on the surface. I love what you said about these relics forcing the reader to grapple with the histories of what we’ve left behind, because that is what I felt was happening to me when I faced the material world around me when I returned to the South. The items in the pawn shop become concrete symbols of not only our individual pasts, but of our collective American pasts.

With each object we encounter, we are forced to experience the way we either are connected to it or alienated from it: both of those reactions intrigue me as a writer. Each of us has built distinct narratives of our histories and identities based on the materiality of our own lives. Imagery as a tool taps into this, but it also becomes problematic when we assume that we are all reading images the same way. Objects, the images, the left-behind stuff of these poems, seemed to me to be useful tools for trying to explore that tension between the familiar and the foreign, the way place and culture can cultivate nostalgia or a sense of displacement, of otherness.

APD: The speaker of “The Whole Town” is rooted in Mississippi—”I was born below/these trees.” The speaker of “Sometimes We’re All Living in A Foreign Country” complicates what it means to know a place:

I thought I knew a little about small southern towns–
what it meant to leave to live.
Now every direction takes me to a foreign land.
every turn returns me to a history that’s my own.

In a book that focuses on the uprooted nature of modernity, how do you understand the role of Mississippi in the collection? How do the poems about Mississippi contribute to and complicate the book’s examination of foreignness?

RMF: In terms of the broader questions I’m trying to explore in the book, I keep thinking of the Faulkner quote, ‘To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.” Politically, Mississippi is both canary in the coal mine and it is representative of our country and its weaknesses; it is a place that can teach us what happens when you don’t care for the environment and education and the health and well-being of all people, it is a place that holds some of our most shameful and horrific history as a nation. The poem “Bombed” emerged after I attended a Freedom Summer anniversary conference at the University of Southern Mississippi, where people who had participated in the civil rights movement as local activists, or as students in the freedom schools, spoke about their experiences. Hearing their stories changed my life, and sent me to the oral history archives. Only one of the poems from this made it into the book: I felt I had to tell the story of Vernon Dahmer. What does it say about our country that we don’t all know the story of the KKK firebombing and killing a man in his own home, where his wife and children were with him, for helping other Black citizens register to vote? How do we not all know the story of these murders going unpunished for decades?

To me, the foreign country is not Mississippi, but the corners and histories and laws of all of this country that deny humanity, that look away from who we really are as a nation. Of course, this particular sense of foreignness is more widespread post the 2016 presidential election, as people start to look around and notice where they have been living all along.

APD: In this collection about physical and metaphysical uprootedness, bodies are often left separated or in hiding at the end of poems. “The Movements of Mechanical Objects” imagines the fate of a fading dancer figurine in a jewelry box: “The body/junked and thrown/from the box. Separated/from everything that moves.” In “Rubbernecker,” a Midwestern flaneur who finds his city “scrambled” retreats to a ditch because “If you hide from/these vast forces, sometimes they spare you.” Can you speak more about the fate of bodies—both human and constructed—in this collection? I’d also love to hear about how you approach the endings of poems and how your approach has shifted collection to collection.

RMF: I find that the body continues to come into my poems in complicated ways as a reflection of what it is to live in the female body in this world. I also felt a bodily vulnerability in Mississippi that I had never experienced before: I was hit by a car (driven by an IRS agent!) my first week there; we had a hurricane scare my first week of classes; a powerful tornado destroyed a nearby neighborhood and some of campus at the start of my second semester; and at the end of my second year there, I became very ill with Rocky Mountain spotted fever from a tick bite and my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. I was suddenly viscerally aware of the body’s powerlessness in relationship to all things great and small, and I suppose this found its way into the poems.

And what a great question about endings: I wish I had a better understanding of what drives my endings. I have always loved Frost’s “The Figure a Poem Makes,” where he says, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” Writing a poem is an act of discovery and/or investigation for me: I seek out that sense of surprise and delight in the early drafts, where I hope I learn or uncover something by the end of the poem. I’ll add that I imagine that my love for the lyric, and particularly the sonnet, can push me towards a certain kind of turn at the ends of poems.

APD: My favorite poem is “Postscript from Mississippi.” The speaker knows a place intimately enough to know what outsiders get wrong—to know what outsiders cannot see: “You want it all to be a metaphor. I’m watching/a front porch crumble. Still, someone sits there.” I write about the Rust Belt—a place that’s often misrepresented—and I wondered if you have additional thoughts about depictions of Mississippi in literature. Is this poem in response to a larger issue?

RMF: That poem captures some of the disconnect I felt living as an outsider calling Mississippi home: from the beginning, there was the aching shock of seeing the visible poverty of the rural South, particularly in the Delta, but also in some parts of the city where I was living. When you live in a place, you see humans living their lives, handling whatever they have been dealt the best they can. While I was frustrated with a state government that makes choices that keeps the state vying for last place in so many areas, especially health and education, I was also frustrated with the outside perception of Mississippi as an anomaly, the butt of all jokes, built on stereotypes that can allow people to ignore the way Mississippi is a reflection of our history and presence as a whole country. Regional caricatures deny the humanity of a people and deflect from the real problems of areas that don’t have the affluence to keep suffering and inequity out of sight.

Recently Joyce Carol Oates made an infuriating and ignorant comment on Twitter, saying, “If Mississippians read, Faulker would be banned.” Not only does she discount the reading and writing lives of Mississippians, but she flippantly disregards that the actual problems of illiteracy in Mississippi are rooted in the legacy of slavery and in ongoing inequality. She shows a complete lack of consideration of the diverse people of Mississippi and their real lives and concerns. (Does she know, for example, that more than a third of Mississippi’s citizens are African American?) She is not alone in her perceptions. In the Mississippi poems, I wanted to push past the joke, the symbol, the stereotypes, and write about our country, about what it looks like in a place so many people refuse to even visit.

I’m excited to see new representations of Mississippi coming from young writers, such as Mississippi poet Jermaine Thompson, and fiction writer Sonya Larson, who is writing about early Chinese communities in Mississippi. We need writers from both inside and outside of the South to take on its complexities and its many realities.

APD: In the collection, “foreignness” is approached and deconstructed from many angles, and one that I found especially mesmerizing is how perception through space can render the known into something new. In “Bird’s Eye” and “Crusoe is Still There,” distance erases contact and perception of life—“Bird’s Eye” concludes the collection with the line “From a distance, there are no bodies.” Did the poem always have this anchoring position in the collection? Can you talk more about the organization of the collection and the argument that the order makes about the relationships between how we look at the world and what we see?

RMF: In early versions of this manuscript, the final poem was “The Bridge,” which I realize, after reading your question here, has the same sort of gesture of perception and distance: the poem ends looking across the bridge at a glittering distant city. This perspective seemed important to me to end with in order to show both the gesture and frustration of trying to look back at ourselves, at our pasts, at the places we inhabit or have left behind.

Environmental destruction and pollution on a local level was another force I was grappling with in this book, and in this particular poem. My neighbor was a lawyer who had come to town for a few years to settle a suit with a large company accused of extensive pollution that led to cancer, and there were some other significant environmental issues where we were, ranging from superfund sites to unpleasant visceral experiences that were hard to measure in terms of threat: the water that came out of my tap was often brown, and the downtown was frequently overwhelmed with a stench that came from outdated sewage lagoons affected by the waste from a manufacturer. Clean water and clean air and soil are, of course, an issue across the U.S., across the world. It felt important to end the book with that broader vantage point with “Bird’s Eye,” which to me reflects, among other things, global environmental destruction.

APD:Who are some poets and artists that you turned to while working on Sometimes We’re All Living in A Foreign Country? Can you share what you’re currently working on and reading?

RMF: One that stands out is Caki Wilkinson’s The Wynona Stone Poems, which is just a marvel of a book with its one-of-a-kind Southern woman protagonist. I was also constantly reading and teaching old and new books by Terrance Hayes and Kevin Young: these are two poets of my generation whose work is really exciting to me for its music, its relevance, its formal innovation. Photographer Sally Mann’s memoir “Holding Still” was also a memorable read to me during this time period. She not only captures the home of my early childhood (my childhood was split between Lexington and Charlottesville), but she expresses that deep, hungry connection one can feel to a land itself, that umbilical chord-like connection I feel to Virginia.

Another big influence on this book was Mississippi photographer Betty Press, whose photograph is on the cover of this collection. She models for me the way one can reflect the many layers of the South, with its surface decay, its difficult history and presence, its beauty and humanity. I have framed prints of hers above my writing desk.

As for my own current projects, I am in the early stages of a new book, in which I’m investigating early automatons–medieval and 18th and 19th century automatons–as well as modern robots. I am having a lot of fun reading and researching for these poems, and it helps that I live with a Medievalist, whose bookshelves are a gold mine! My doctoral dissertation is also calling me to return to it: that book is a collection of poems about my family’s history and heritage in the Philippines. It is a book that keeps growing and changing as I try to get it right.

On my reading table right now are new books by Joseph Legaspi, Charif Shanahan, Angela Ball, and Hadara Bar-Nadav. I’m also currently obsessed with the novels of Rachel Cusk, whose seamless narrative moves fascinate me. I hope her work will influence my poems in some interesting way.

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Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of three collections of poetry: Little Murders Everywhere, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; The Spokes of Venus (Carnegie Mellon 2016), and Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country (Carnegie Mellon 2017). Her poems have appeared in such places as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and Guernica. She is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for her next manuscript in progress. She is the Jacob Ziskind Poet in Residence at Brandeis University and co-founder and editor of the online magazine Memorious.

 

Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017) and Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press, 2013), winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. She holds an MFA from Ohio State University and fellowships from Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner program and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She’s a PhD student at The University of Tennessee.

Exquisite Desolation: Emily Fridlund’s Catapult | Review by Sarah Appleton

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Emily Fridlund has had an eventful year: her novel The History of Wolves was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and her short story collection, Catapult, won Sarabande Books’s Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Ben Marcus. Fridlund’s short stories are riveting; they tantalize in their description and submerge readers in the ominous, off-kilter world of her characters.

Fridlund entrances the reader right from the start of each story. “My wife could take your skin off with one glance, she was that excruciating,” begins the opening story, “Expecting.” This bluntness is characteristic of her narrators and their opening lines, and the underlying threat leaves little room to doubt that darkness will follow. These openings often skirt the plot’s central tension and speak instead to the narrator’s root of or excuse for their present situation, illuminating a quality of the character that tips toward deranged by the end of the story. “It wasn’t my husband that wanted the bear, it was me,” the narrator opens “Lake Arcturus Lodge,” a story about a couple starting a lodge and attempting to start a family too, although they are divided on this. In the titular story, the adolescent narrator says, “That summer I was reading vampire books, so when Noah said no to sex, I let myself pretend that’s what he was. I told myself: inside his mouth is a hallway to death.” Of course, the whole story, then, is about sex and not about sex, about a girl teetering on the cusp of not-quite-womanhood. As these opening lines demonstrate, the lines work to frame the character’s already off-kilter world, which tilts further as the plot progresses.

Perhaps the most unifying characteristic of the collection’s eleven stories are the fraught relationships between characters—husbands and wives, best friends, parents and children, those who are thrown together by circumstance, characters who are often waiting or stalled in a liminal space. In “Expecting,” the narrator thinks of his son’s pregnant girlfriend, “She looks devastated by her body. I tell her she looks nice because I’m afraid for her.” Later, when the baby is born, the characters are discomfited by her aloofness, her decidedly unbaby-like qualities. “She reminds me of my wife,” the narrator thinks, “and I pray that the baby will never learn to talk, never wobble onto her feet so she can walk away…We call her ‘the baby’ to her face to make ourselves feel better.” Before the baby, two females walked out of the narrator’s life, and this sense of isolation and being left behind pervades the collection. It recurs in “Here, Still.” The narrator thinks, “With most people in my life, I come to the end of myself pretty fast. I walk to my borders—where there’s dinner on a dropleaf table, maybe small talk or sex—then wave politely and turn back. [My best friend] made me sorry there wasn’t anywhere better to go.” This narrator, like others, is more than arm’s length from those around her, fundamentally incapable of forging a human connection with those she ought to be closest to, who love her most.

Characters also experience fraught relationships with their selves. “I was still holding out hope that my body could go back to being what it was a year ago, effortless and completely forgettable,” the narrator of the titular story says, “but that was starting to seem less and less likely.” Her thought belies her vulnerability, but smacks of Fridlund’s precise description, too, which enables readers to feel, like the narrator, the “effortless and completely forgettable” body she once had. In “Lake Arcturus Lodge,” a guest visiting the lodge gets drunk and tells the story about leaving his mother to die in an avalanche.  “‘I just wanted to survive,’” he says, “‘but now I can’t do nothing. I’m a napkin. I’m rust.’” The guest’s description of himself moves from something disposable to something already decayed, a description which rings with exceptional eloquence.

Fridlund also stuns readers with the preciseness and concision of her characterization: “Her mother is in her fifties, widowed, loyal to horoscopes. She is afraid of making decisions that work against her fate,” from “Time Difference,” and “I thought of how Tom combed his hair before he came to bed, the way he once wore swimming goggles in a snowstorm,” in “Here, Still.” Fridlund wrenches readers most, however, with her salient descriptions of the human condition and the relationships we cultivate. “Childhood, by then, had been sucked dry by the unremitting soullessness of adolescence,” the newly-teenaged narrator laments in the titular story. In “Time Difference,” the narrator notes, “The problem with living with someone is that your every act can be transformed into another example of their larger theory of you,” a sentence which may well sum up the experiences and relationships of most of the collection’s narrators given their insularity.

One of the most striking pieces of the collection, “Gimme Shelter,” is distinctive because it’s composed of short vignettes that build a life, and ultimately disorient the reader as the narrator, Lynn, becomes increasingly unreliable. The story is anchored by the house she grew up in and the family it once contained. In the second vignette, Lynn recounts a dream in which the house has a 19th century library that her parents have hidden from her and her siblings. She professes to understand “that [her parents] were just a little cruel, to hide the best room in the house from their children.” Although her parents have done no such thing, the sentiment sticks despite the apparent normalcy of her childhood. From this moment, Lynn’s psychological state seems to slowly and subtly deteriorate. In the end, Fridlund circles back to the structure of a house. Lynn, reminiscing with her siblings at her father’s funeral, reflects on the game of their mother’s invention they played as children: “it seemed possible to Lynn for a brief instant that no other reality had in fact ever fully existed for any of them, that there had only ever been that old car on the highway with all of them inside, each locked in their chosen rooms, and she wondered in anguish and awe how many times she would forget and have to remember this again.” Lynn reveals how isolated she’s felt all along, thereby becoming another of Fridlund’s isolated narrators despite their proximity to people who love them.

In short, Fridlund’s collection is a riveting read, and the blow of one last line leads to the scintillating opening sentence of the following story. At times, Fridlund may push her original detail a little too far, distracting readers from the central tensions of a scene rather than enriching them. This, however, is not the norm; on the whole, the collection is so enthralling that it can be read in one go, but its stories are so devastating that one yearns to read them repeatedly. “It’s all too staged, too obvious to talk about,” the frustrated narrator of “Lock Jaw” thinks. Like the narrator’s situation, these stories are conspicuously staged, set against desolate, decrepit backdrops, peopled with isolated, off-kilter characters. And yet, these stories are far from being too obvious to talk about. They are exactly what we should be saying.

 

Catapult: Stories
by Emily Fridlund
Sarabande Books, 2017
 ISBN: 978-1946448057
240 pp. / $15.95

 

 

 

 

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Sarah Appleton earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at Western Washington University. Her writing projects focus on memory, family, and feminism. She currently teaches at Cranbrook Kingswood School where she lives with  her fiancé and beautiful Australian Shepherd, Zoë. You can find her@sarahkapples on Twitter.

“Henry Puts the Casual Back in Casualty”: Conor Bracken’s Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour | Review by Allison Pitinii Davis

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In Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), winner of the 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger takes the speaker on a surreal tour of international atrocities. The collection’s absurdism deglorifies and satirizes Kissinger and his neo-imperialist policies. By posing as Kissinger’s lover, the speaker inhabits a self-incriminating position. This suggests that Kissinger represents both himself but also the oppressor in all Americans—we all are complicit in his crimes. The dark humor in this collection cuts both ways—by the end, to accuse Kissinger is to accuse the self.  

The title—a play on Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima mon amour—foreshadows the themes of war and love. The collection’s 19 poems place readers in the aftermaths of military campaigns and state terror, especially Cold-War-era Operation Condor (1968–1989). The collection situates Kissinger’s involvement in the operation in the larger context of historic atrocity through its exploration of the Nazi-led Oradour-sur-Glane massacre (1944) and Papal-led Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229). These poems aestheticize the banality of evil—in “My First Day in Argentina,” “The Albigensian Crusade,” and especially in “A Short History of Operation Condor,” Kissinger and the speaker commemorate human suffering by gorging themselves on food, capitalism, white supremacy, and each other: 

We fed each other delicacies with dirty hands— 
dulce de leche under our nails, beefy 
sinews between our teeth. We flossed 
with the flags of every country but our own. 

We bought islands we couldn’t even stripmine.  
We were white and alive and in love 
with the little pulse in each other’s wrist 
that went give and take and give and take 

and take take take take take take take. (5, 9-17) 

Eating and loving are conflated with exploiting—Kissinger cannot act without exploiting. He is depicted as a system that converts every movement into acquisition. Even when giving, Kissinger is taking, as if every act he commits is surrounded by an absolute value sign that ensures that he ends up on top. Tonally, from the title onward, the collection forces language into a similar machine—no matter how violent the atrocity, the high-satire allows the collection to discuss it like it’s mundane. The result is that Kissinger and the speaker’s language itself commits an atrocity: it makes the immoral tonally moral. The form of the collection enacts its contents: for Kissinger and the speaker, “We bought islands we couldn’t even strip-mine” is an act of giddy luxury. For the reader who is in on the satire, it is a chance to get deeper into the psychology of evil than a more solemn collection would have allowed. Allowing the reader in this close is uncomfortable, and that is a success of the book. Bracken doesn’t hide behind self-righteousness, and in result, he doesn’t allow his readers to find refuge in their own feelings of innocence. This is a collection that asks us to look at and listen to Kissinger only to realize that Kissinger is a mirror, an echo.  

Speaking of looking at Kissinger, the speaker does it a lot, and in this collection about mass murders, it is significant that the body we see most mangled is Kissinger’s. Perhaps the most provocative poem is “Henry Makes a Suggestion.” Kissinger’s suggestion is that the speaker turns Kissinger’s body into a canoe. The list of specifics is funny until we reach the skin: 

His legs the oars, an arm the tiller, 
the ribs and spine a sturdy frame over which 
to stretch and batten the skin 
I’ll have to shave and tan and oil first (15, 3-6) 

These lines that ask the reader to imagine Kissinger’s skin being stretched and tanned cannot avoid asking the reader to think about the irony of Kissinger’s history. Kissinger, born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1923, fled Nazi persecution in 1938. These lines recall the popular accusation that Nazis—most famously, Ilse Koch—made lampshades out of the skin of concentration camp inmates. Kissinger extended the cruelty to others that Nazis wanted to extend to him and his family—he narrowly escaped persecution only to persecute others. These lines suggest that perhaps Kissinger has awareness of this, and this poem is as close as Kissinger comes to admitting guilt. 

Kissinger’s dehumanized body situates Kissinger’s irony within a larger historical lesson: the oppressed can become the oppressor.  In the final poem of the collection, “The Vulgar Luxury It Is to Be,” the speaker enacts Kissinger’s violence when he kills a chicken and imagines, to relieve his guilt, that the chicken wanted to die. The speaker believes, like Kissinger, that he has the right to transform his victim’s suffering into a larger narrative about the oppressor’s suffering. The speaker imagines that his own hunger “is a sacrament/even this chicken knelt to take.//I believe I am owed this” (35, 25-17). Kissinger and the speaker (and thus, the reader) become one, and the collection intentionally leaves the reader with nowhere to wash our hands of the union. 

 

Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour
by Conor Bracken
Bull City Press, 2017
 ISBN: 978-1-4951-5768-4
48 pp. / $12.00

 

 

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Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017) and Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press, 2013), winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. She holds an MFA from Ohio State University and fellowships from Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner program and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in Best American Poetry 2016, Crazyhorse, The New Republic, The Bind, The New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. She is a PhD student at The University of Tennessee.