Blue Physics by Mary Lou Buschi Review by Zainab Omaki

Blue Physics by Mary Lou Buschi

Review by Zainab Omaki

Publisher: Lily Poetry Review Books

Publication Date: February 7, 2024

ISBN: 9781957755380

Pages: 78

Mary Lou Buschi’s third full-length collection Blue Physics is a startlingly vivid portrait of grief, girlhood, and family. Steeped in storytelling that transposes the reader to times long past and locations never visited, the collection has the wondrous ability to perform a task typically associated with fiction—to forget oneself, fully immersing the psyche in the characters.

“A tableau of a family / how wrong / to think a family was like a body / a central heart / it’s really a tree, splitting / from the weight of all that living,” Buschi writes early on, establishing two of the most central concerns of the book—grief and family. One of Buschi’s brothers dies in her adolescence after multiple disappearances, and the burden on the family is astronomical. “My Mother Too Grief Stricken to Mother,” she entitles one poem about her grandmother attempting to pick up the slack in the wake of her mother’s mourning. In a prose poem about her own deep anguish, she declares, “I fixed my gaze on the lower right-hand crack in my bedroom window while the details of my brother’s death flashed. I knew if I shut my eyes I would fall, but today I let go.” A portrait, thus, develops, in Buschi’s capable hands, about a family attempting to go through heartbreak individually; concentric circles who are never able to touch.

Although the grief is initially distributed amongst these family members, it whittles down to be only hers as she loses a brother, another brother, a grandmother, a mother, and a father over time. In some ways, she had lost them prior to their sadness, but death more fully claims them, rendering her, by default, the memory keeper. She memorializes them in her words: “Light, light, light. I close my eyes and there / I’m in the back seat again. My father’s hands curved / around the wheel and my mother gesturing / toward the sky.” Of her grandmother, she writes: “The city so bright / a blinking Park Here, the only light in sight / Non sei solo. Non sei solo I was alone with my grandmother.” Death has stripped them from her, but she manages to keep them alive and share them graciously with the reader in language that is so precise one gets a sense of the people they were.

Even when the collection is not explicitly talking about grief, darkness permeates it. Buschi describes a visit to Coney Island where she sees a bearded woman. “I wanted to tell her that we aren’t so different, and, in fact / we are all animals. I wanted to share that I had a dilation and curettage / when I was nine, a D&C, which is why I asked to have my breasts removed.” The rawness of these lines and the shock of them are mirrored in the destructive urges she experiences on a plane ride. “And you / who thought while boarding this plane / you’ve had enough. / Do it / Open the metal rib cage / toss the others out / like paper petals / before the sudden / decompression / tears the roof off / watch each one of them sink into the unrest of the ocean.” Without expressly being told, we are made to understand how her familial trauma has weaved its way into other parts of her life. As with most true suffering, it doesn’t remain politely contained.

The most rich and gorgeous part of the collection, though, lies in the poet’s rendering of girlhood and adolescence. Buschi masterfully plops us down in the 70s where we experience what it is like to watch flowers bud for the first time and engage in a game of “Kiss Kill” and trouble a school custodian. Girlhood is full of torments, she shows us. On a school trip, she states: “I was invisible, so when she hugged me / I wanted to rip my skin off,” and “I never wanted to come on this search, with its / benevolence, self-actualization, and love / Not everyone wants to be found / I was meant to let the grass grow / over me, a landscape to bury other bodies.” The horrors of adolescence are even more exacerbated by growing up Catholic. “Sister Evangeline / Francis made sure to remind me that / even with / guidance from “above” I chose to listen / to a team of sinners waking in a / half darkened wood / where I felt unafraid,” she reveals. Childhood is tumultuous and often chaotic and glorious all at once. The sense of nostalgia that suffuses these poems makes the latter obvious, regardless of the verses’ content.

Buschi plays with forms and the multiple meanings of words and phrases throughout her book. She renders poems in the form of letters, in blackout styles. The playful duality that runs through her poems is evident in one such as “Falling,” where she employs a grotesque spike that impaled a child as a metaphor “for how we broke Ben’s heart everyday with multiple tongues / that carried the weight and viscosity of blood.” The duality is also shown in another about the game of “Kiss Kill,” where the terminology of smooching and murder is used to unveil the violence children wield against one another when one is even a little different. “To kiss is to touch. To kill is the death of that touch,” Buschi writes.

While the collection is generally kept trained on the poet’s own experiences, it occasionally turns outwards to the wider world. Buschi worries about the trajectory of humanity in “Terrified for this World,” a poem about daredevil teenagers on Motocross bikes who have very little regard for their own lives. In “I Saw a Girl,” she contemplates the ways male power can be turned on vulnerable women after witnessing an abusive scene out of a car window. She comes to the realization that “there is more than / enough unhappiness” in the world in the poem “Train Ride through Small Towns” after observing the heaviness people shoulder across the country. The same feat of connection she manages to perform in connecting the reader to her family is stretched to the rest of humankind as the threads that link us are pulled upon and amplified.

Smart and evocative, Blue Physics as a whole is a wonderfully realized group of poems. Heavy in its subjects, Buschi, nevertheless, demonstrates transportive powers. She takes us with her as she revisits both the painful and the charmingly wholesome. She shows us what it means to love and grieve and come of age in a time already being forgotten.

Mary Lou Buschi’s collections of poetry are Paddock (Lily Poetry Review Books 2021), Awful Baby, (Red Paint Hill 2015), and 3 chapbooks: Ukiyo-e, Tight Wire, and The Spell of Coming (or Going). Mary Lou holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and a Master of Science in Urban Education from Mercy College. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals such as Ploughshares, Glacier, FIELD, Willow Springs, Indiana Review, Radar, Tar River, Cream City, Rhino, The Laurel Review, among others. She lives in Nyack, NY and is a full-time special education teacher in the Bronx. Her preferred pronouns are she/her.

Zainab Omaki is a Nigerian writer currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She has a Masters in the same field from the University of East Anglia, where she was the recipient of the Miles Morland African Writer’s award. Her work has appeared in a number of periodicals, including Passages North, Transition Magazine, The Rumpus, Isele, and Southwest Review. For her novel-in-progress, she has also been supported by the University of Bayreuth in Germany, the Jan Michalski foundation in Switzerland, and the Nebraska Arts Council.

10 July 2024