Book Review: Beautiful Nerve by Sheila Squillante

Beautiful Nerve
Poems by Shelia Squillante
Tiny Hardcore Press, April 2014
ISBN-13: 987-0982469743
93 pp.
Reviewed by Trista Edwards

Shelia Squillante’s debut collection Beautiful Nerve surveys the divergent, yet paradoxically symbiotic relationship of opposing forces—body and mind, fiction and reality, what is whole and what is divide, the strange and the familiar. The nerve is both a source of vivacity and despondency. But how can we grow from experiencing these bifurcated sensations?

The collection’s opening poem, “There’s a Certain Slant of Light,” centers on a young girl contemplating her size within her surrounding universe:

When you were girl in Lexington, you would stare at the
…..swirled
ceiling and feel the world contract; close your eyes
and watch your body expand hugely so that it overgrew
the frame of your perception, stalkish and quick—
growing, the top and edges beyond
your sight; and also, simultaneously, grow infinitely small
and then smaller, being spirited backward and away
like an astronaut: feet, arms out, fingers splayed and pulsing
in the drift from ship.
…………………………In these moments of great dread—you have
no other word for what this was—you think, this is what
                 it feels like
            to be both.         

In this poem, and many others throughout the book, Squillante focuses on the body as locus of tension, as a place of existing in two dimensions. The girl in the poem is evaluating her entire existence. She realizes she is both finite and infinite and experiences trepidation. This poem suggests the question does this dread keep you? Further along in “There’s a Certain Slant of Light” the speaker seems to suggest that in youth it just may:

………….Winters under the window, bonfires
in the gutter drains. Seven p.m. twilight-lit snow
and sledders down Monticello Boulevard. Your mothers
………….fears
kept you at the sill. Breath frozen to glass. Mottled shag
carpet. Blue and blue and blue. An ocean under your hand.

The girl stays behind the glass windowpane to watch sledders brave the streets. A mother’s potential fears of the outside world keep the girl in the disguised, vulnerable, and temporary safety of the domestic space. The nerve to go outside is not yet fulfilled in adolescence but is later achieved in “This Weather” where familial domesticity drives one away.

The speaker here contemplates the fantasy of escape:

…………………….In the series finale of your favorite cable television
…………drama,
a young woman with insistent red hair drives away.

Away from her crazy, beloved family and toward a bright,
heavy life. Drives a heavy family away. Heaves a family finale.
Toward and away from now which feels as much like a place
as time—your body, its milky topography with no map key
in the bottom left-hand corner.

This poem again comments on what it feels like to be both—that sensation of toward and away. The beautiful nerve of being is to acknowledge the contradictory self. The female character in the drama reflects the conflicting state of her body—the toward and away— as the speaker experiences in her role as mother. Her body is wholly intimate unto herself and wholly foreign as it becomes an object of nourishment for her child:

…………………………………………..The woman, a bright
stranger

on the television. The child, a heaving stranger in your arms.
For two weeks now: dull ache, shut drapes, rocking, rocking,
rock-hard breasts in a hot shower, hoarse voice in a hot
shower, voice singing in a darkened room, voice brightening,
awakening, pushing you down.

Squillante eloquently captures the paradox of living but also expresses contentment with one’s own messy complexity. As the speaker proclaims in “Beatitude,”

Blessed be the office furniture with the fake wood grain:
some things come close
and that’s enough.

These poems contain characters that grapple with finding verisimilitude in impossibility. Squillante explores the limits of body and the boundless aspects of perception as the catalyst of growth—to possess the nerve and have that be enough.

Trista Edwards is currently a contributing writer at Luna Luna Magazine Her poems and reviews are published or forthcoming in The Journal, Mid-American Review, 32 Poems, American Literary Review, The Adroit Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Rumpus, Sout’wester, Moon City Review, and more. She recently edited an anthology, Till the Tide: An Anthology of Mermaid Poetry (2015). She lives in Denton, Texas.