Loss, the pain that accompanies such an experience, and the process of re-purposing that pain to a greater cause are concepts many authors attempt to grasp and grapple with through language; readers hope to catch a glimpse of themselves in the pages, looking for a reflection of their own lives expressed in the words staring back at them. This reflection of self has been painted beautifully upon the pages of Skin Memory, John Sibley Williams’ latest collection of poetry. Williams manages to capture the essence of life, both joys and pains, triumphs and regrets, in a way that reflects a broader experience transcending generational and cultural differences.

The poems depict an array of memories and their resulting emotions, referencing numerous ties to the collective human experiences of pain and growth, and magnifying these experiences using natural, sometimes idyllic, language. In a poem attempting to cope with the suicides of those close to him, Williams writes, “It helps to draw them hungry / clusters of light loping across the night / sky, such flames in their bellies. To connect / each with my finger and name / this little universe after the gods / our god swallowed to give us / a glimpse into creation.” Williams’ language is both captivating and haunting, expertly expressing the dark and light of humanity through peaceful, yet foreboding, representations of natural landscape. This mirroring of experience and organic imagery reflects the ways in which memories haunt both mind and body, described as he writes, “Please don’t say you can see my father’s father in my face when I / cry over fireflies, dimming. This porch cannot sustain both sky and / shadow. Shadows: shifted and lengthened by dawn. Ancestors: / earth-swallowed, de-starred, god enough for now. Our universes / hold together by strings and cups strung between men speaking softly / to each other like children.” Williams seems to be searching for personal identity in this confessional-style poem, looking to the intangibility in the moment as a way to root himself to a father, or possibly a God, that he is unable to grasp and hold close.

Skin Memory depicts the beauty of human existence while allowing space for the reality of modern life, regrettable decisions, and unexpected misfortunes. The poems are written in styles that switch from an uninterrupted column of text to a free form without any recognizable patterns and then back again, a method that draws the eye down the page, pulling the reader along in a blurred trajectory from recollection to reflection. Williams blends this amalgamation of experience, grappling with the transience of life: “Every few thousand years the holy betrays us: ash / darkens firmament, fire surges from a / dying culture’s mouth. That nothing / dies for long is a story we tell ourselves / to make the earth easier to sing, to / convince the earth we may have once / added something to it.” As the book progresses, Williams takes the readers on a journey of possibility and reclamation, searching for the ties between the past and present. He also weaves in the important theme of longing—a desire for the memories of the future to be made more purposeful—perhaps even more beautiful—by re-purposing pain in a different light, with a different intention, and through a more hopeful eye: “There Is Still / something thin to swing from madly /over the glory-faded cottonwood. A / different kind of rope & knot, sure, / & a different purpose. But our limbs / haven’t changed much; all ascent & / greed. The sky yielding just enough / of itself to urge us higher.”

Williams uses language which conjures a sense of the bucolic, allowing readers to explore their own associations with memory and past, culture and ancestry, experience and emotion. In this way, he manages to translate his own history into a representation of the universal experience of losing times passed and intentionally stepping, with hope, into the moments still to come, a personal confrontation all readers can identify with. Skin Memory is a beautiful reclamation of past pains and beauties, allowing readers to once again experience the sensations of life—of lifetimes, even—as it has been written upon our very bodies. Williams forces us to come to terms with our own hopes and failures, immerse ourselves in our own humanity, and recognize what it means to live within a collective experience: “The theory goes / we’ve been told the moon / is composed of so many / impossible things / we’re left to pray to / whatever we can make / spark. Dammit, we can / make the world spark / for a night. I believe all / our little massacres / are held together / by Scotch tape / steadily and sadly / unsticking.”

Rachel Harper is a student at the University of Tennessee pursuing an MA in English Literature. Her interest is on 19th and 20th century literature with a special focus on ecofeminism, religious critique, and how those elements are utilized in the Gothic genre.  

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s The Many Names for Mother is a collection of bravery.  By this, I do not mean merely that the poet herself is brave in sharing her art – though she is – or that her poetry looks the hardships of motherhood square in the eye – though it does.  Dasbach approaches her subject in a movingly matter-of-fact way, with neither flippancy nor self-indulgence.  I mean that this book is a record of small and large acts of bravery across landscapes and generations.  I mean that Dasbach probes the idea and experience of motherhood through all means – social, linguistic, physical, historical, formal – with a determination to accept what she uncovers. 

While the collection’s theme is expansive, the speakers of Dasbach’s poems do not roam blindly.  Each truth or tension she offers is grounded in viscerality, most often of the human body.  In the first of the “Other Women Don’t Tell You” series that binds the collection, the speaker – after mourning the corporeal destruction that is the price of motherhood – muses “…my body was an ark once.”  Juxtaposing images of her still dilated cervix and clumps of lost hair with the body of her newborn child, she distills into a mere thirty one lines a reality perhaps too frightening or freeing for others to tell: “How your hands / would never keep up.” 

In another iteration of the “Other Women Don’t Tell You” series, this in the book’s third movement, the speaker links the imperfections of her child’s physical existence – a runny nose, a bruised elbow – to the blame for such imperfections that mothers are so often burdened with.  This equation of corporeal and moral failings highlights the harsh absurdity of the judgement mothers both bear and exact on one another, while at the same time establishing an intellectual space in which the body becomes a projection of past realities.  Noting a birthmark on her son’s body, she concludes, addressing herself, “that one’s especially your fault,” imagining the pressure of her anxious fingertips reaching through the womb and “marking him afraid, / the history he comes from / in perpetual, dark bloom.”  Thus, a birthmark becomes the embodiment of her child’s violence-ridden heritage. 

Central to Dasbach’s exploration of maternity is the idea of intergenerational trauma, and she again utilizes language of corporeality to access truths across time and landscape.  Her Jewish and Ukrainian heritage and identity as a first generation American announces itself as a source of poetic tension from the first page.  “Against Naming,” the book’s opening poem, features a speaker confiding in her yet unborn child that she has made a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, “Against / my family’s urges, against even your future / ones, maybe,” in order to confront a history that, while she is privileged with the opportunity to leave in the past, across the Atlantic, she chooses to remember.  Ending on the idea that the speaker will give her child a name “unmarked / by ancestry or first generation or Slavic…” the poem enters into dialogue with a dissonance central to the rest of the book:  the distance between remembrance and memorial. 

The Many Names for Mother is a record of a mother’s measuring the space between her history and her child’s future.  “Remember,” she instructs in “Letter To My Son,” “here you are a white man…. Know, across the water you are dark.”  While repeating orders for her son to recognize the violence that brought him into a relatively privileged existence, the speaker also emphasizes his separation from past persecution.  This tension also is grounded in the body.  Through literal and figurative description of her son’s newborn body, the poet questions what inherited trauma looks, feels, and even sounds like:

the dead under
your skin your feet inside your mouth
They crack your white bones
milk teeth raw gum line still sealing soft spot.

Her passion for linguistics – clear through the whole of the collection – here opens up additional layers of understanding and embodiment of this history.  Into this same, very serious poem, Dasbach manages to weave light through wordplay, reaching toward a gestalt more beautiful than its historical and physical fragments and allowing her child to exist on the page as a sovereign being, recognizing even his mute, infant form as more than a convenient poetic image:

But remember, little sun, you are more
… than body or metaphor can make you
or color name you or land and water divide you
more than ma or man or mine.

While the book roams across time and space to access diverse portraits of motherhood, it is also self-aware as a work of art.  Part of Dasbach’s bravery as a poet is her willingness to admit the limitations of her own voice in addressing narratives that exceed her own experiences.  An anxiety of appropriation burdens but does not restrain her work – rather, in the face of this fear the poet challenges herself to address the stakes of writing in the liminal space between known and unknown, using this tension as yet another point of access to the question of what it means to be a mother.  This is best exemplified in “The Question,” arguably the only persona poem in the whole collection, written in the voice of the poet’s mother.  Here, Dasbach measures the pain and privilege within her choice to speak intergenerational stories and the degree of truth she can and cannot achieve in doing so as the American-born daughter of a Ukrainian immigrant mother.  “Is the only difference in our accounts,” the mother’s voice asks,

accent and accent-less?  Is hers more vivid?
Its gaps filled in by years of stories.
So young, she never could have seen
the places cast now in a worded half-light.
Still, she captures them and calls it
art, calls it poetry, calls, without
hearing me say: I lived that thing you like to reimagine –

Dasbach’s questioning the potential of her poetry to distance herself from its subject is paradoxically among the many things that makes her a great poet.  Hers is a voice worth listening to and learning from.  The Many Names for Mother is haunted and haunting, and like all worthwhile poetry, unafraid to confess, simultaneously, “I don’t know,” and “I know all too well.” 

Drew Pisarra takes on the topic of the modern on-again off-again relationship in his raw and clever collection of poems entitled Infinity Standing Up. The work is comprised of 40 Shakespearean sonnets divided into 5 sections. Despite the formal structure inherited from the classic love themed sonnet, the work is very experimental and conversational. I especially enjoyed the thematic rather than sequential numbering of the sonnets. For instance, Sonnet 69, the fourth poem in the collection, depicts the Yin-Yang qualities of a sexual relationship: “a visual symbol for / such sensual play!” Sonnet 32° is about the coldness of an empty relationship. Sonnet 917-589-9XXX is a long run-on sentence text message to an ex, Sonnet Seventeen magazine describes the ex’s maturity, and Sonnet Gazillion is a poem about Cupid’s “countless arrows.”

Each numbered title encapsulates the theme of the individual poem while also bolstering the idea of Infinity Standing Up. Pisarra’s unconventional numbering system evokes the infinite valuations, deviations, and combinations of experiences within different types of love relationships, be it infatuation, breakup, affair, or polyamorous relationship. Pisarra suggests that love, like poetry, cannot be confined by traditional formulas of the past, since the modern digitized world adapts and enumerates the experience of love in new ways.  As a result, the collection sheds light on both the nature of modern relationships and the way modern poetry discusses such experiences.

The first section, Act 1, consists of 10 poems detailing the early period of a love affair, the first turmoil between a couple, and finally the sorrow felt from the breakup. These poems are very visceral. The first poem describes the moment of enraptured infatuation as akin to crawling inside a person and living amongst their organs: “I’d like to climb inside your mouth feet first.” It perfectly captures the sense of discovery and intimacy in a relationship while also pointing to the retrospective gross aspects of an overly enthused infatuation. The topics transition from heightened lust in Sonnet 666, to a failure of information in Sonnet 411, and finally to the sorrow of being dumped by a younger person in Sonnet -1: “I’m not wailing, more like sighing. Isn’t / that a softer grief.” The changing tones narrate both the intense moments and the emotional distance that flurry and dissipate until the relationship dissolves.

The next two sections, Act 2 and Act 2A, deal with the post-breakup sorrows and the rekindled sexual affair. Act 2 includes many contemporary themes related to seeking companionship. For instance, Sonnet 1-800 reminiscences about how the 1-800 sex lines has evolved into the hook-up culture of social media:

Yet where are we now? With our lovelorn apps
(Grindr, Tinder, Tingle, Scruff, and Diskreet)
that spell out longing via finger taps,
 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Hey, emoticon heart… r u nearby?”

Act 2A transitions to a new, guilt laden relationship with the ex. Sonnet $18.99 expresses the speaker feeling cheap because he could not purchase dinner for fear of the relationship being taken too seriously: “I wanted to blame you for making me feel cheap / but I knew you weren’t single, so who’s the creep?” The section ends in Sonnet <2 which cleverly hides deep-seated regret and hatred in the sub-text of an inane conversation between the couple while among their friends.

The final section sees the speaker processing his grief and trying to move on. This section plays heavily upon the mathematic themes throughout the collection. The first poem, “Sonnet Infinity,” begins with the speaker seeing the ex’s body parts everywhere: “your lips, your nose, your ears / landed magically on face after face,” Sonnet Pi denies the idea that a polyamorous relationship works because love can be divided infinitely, and “Sonnet Ø” plays off the sign Ø as symbolic of an empty set (along with other meanings): “It will soon be / over. It will be over. It’s over.” Finally, Sonnet # discusses a therapy session that ends abruptly, indicating that the speaker’s feelings are still present and have not yet been fully worked through.

Pisarra’s combination of traditional and experimental writing offers readers a fresh look into the everchanging topic of finding love. The poems give deep insight into raw emotions, contemporary references, and visceral elations that will appeal to many readers. Balancing this lyricism, brutally distasteful imagery likewise underlines the nauseating aspects of modern relationships. The title, Infinity Standing Up, seems to highlight the embodied abstraction of what it means to write a love poem. I recommend Pisarra’s book as a conscious exploration of the hope and despair of pursuing and failing to find love today.

Michael Sutherlin is a PhD student in English at the University of Tennessee Knoxville where he specializes in Modernism and Literary Theory. His current focus of study is the relationship between religion and secularity as it plays out in twentieth century debates about didacticism.