Book Review: Blackacre by Monica Youn

Reviewed by Alix Anne Shaw

Blackacre
Poems by Monica Youn
Graywolf Press, September 2016
$16.00; 88 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1555977504

Throughout her thoughtful and thought-provoking third collection, Monica Youn explores the implications of living a life whose center has been hollowed out. “I was wrong,” Youn writes in “Hangman’s Tree,” “when I told you / life starts at the center / . . . / / There is another / mode of life, one / that draws sustenance // from the peripheries.” The opening sequence of poems presents the reader with a series of hanged bodies, “now pendant (still sen- / tient),” who nonetheless offer their perspectives on the scant connections that remain (“Testament of the Hanged Man”). For instance, the speaker in “Portrait of a Hanged Woman,” senses a man’s approach “only as a stirring among the coils at her throat,” while the man in “Lamentation of the Hanged Man,” longs “to stop the small / crying blacknesses / of my body with the all- / sufficing blackness / / of the earth.”

Blackacre offers recurring, even obsessive, images not only of hanging but also of looping, grasping, binding, entwining, dragging, snarling, stricturing, and rending. “To section off / is to intensify, / to deaden,” Youn notes in “Self-Portrait in a Wire Jacket.” But the architectures that constrict are also those that sustain: “ungridded / you could / no longer survive.” Although hinting repeatedly at trauma, Youn’s poems skirt the confessional. Instead, they repeatedly enact the erasure of the body, suggesting that retreat to the periphery is the only means of survival. For example, in “Portrait of a Hanged Woman,” Youn offers the extended metaphor of “necessity” as

… a woman
wearing a steel

collar, wearing
a stiffly pleated
dress, which lifts

to reveal nothing
but fabric where
her body used to be.

The image of fabric, in the sense of a tangled web, describes not only the book’s metaphorical system but also its method and structure. For instance, each section’s quoted epigraph seems to refer to the sections beyond it, creating a network of concepts that undergirds the entire text. Historical allusions, including della Francesca, Goya, Martha Graham, and Twinkies, appear throughout the book to anchor the reader to the world outside. While the poems themselves create a complex web of internal associations, Youn’s use of form masterfully but subtly enacts its subject matter. Short, enjambed tercets aptly capture the sense of dangling and tethering, while long, leggy prose lines invoke the idea of exposition, of textual precedent, of interconnection.

While Youn’s work focuses mainly on the forces that both strangle and sustain, it does not ultimately shy away from the emptiness within. The book’s title, as an end-note explains, invokes the legal concept of a fictitious plot of land. Youn imagines this as a barren plain, one “dialed back to featurelessness” (“Greenacre”) where “Nothing is germinating” (“Brownacre”). By the time the reader arrives at “Blackacre,” the title of both poems in the book’s final section, this expanse can be understood as a complete void—a space both of utter darkness and blinding light. In the extended sequence of prose meditations that concludes the book, Youn systematically dissects Milton’s famous sonnet, “On His Blindness.” Here, she sensitively examines not only the delicate threads of connotation that extend from each of the sonnet’s end-words, but also contemplates what it means for her speaker, too, to inhabit the abyss. As if drawing on her previous experience in the courtroom, Youn deftly interrogates and collapses ideas that might otherwise be taken as binaries: “If the ‘outer darkness’ is deemed to be a punishment,” she writes, “then does that lustrous inner darkness count as a reward?” (“6. chide”).

Ultimately, Youn’s third book is both powerful and intelligent. Although unintentionally so, it also seems politically timely: Blackacre can be read not only as a personal exploration, but as an examination of what happens when the body politic has been eviscerated and our survival depends on the structures of precedent that remain. Resisting the easy and oft-travelled trajectory of redemption, Youn leaves the reader in a state of complexity. Insistently cerebral, refreshingly complicated and erudite, Blackacre provides no ready answers to the questions it poses. Instead, it allows them to dangle, unanswered, in our present historical moment.

Alix Anne Shaw is the author of three poetry collections: Rough Ground, forthcoming from Etruscan Press in 2018, Dido in Winter, (Persea 2014), and Undertow (Persea 2007). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Harvard Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, VOLT, and New American Writing. Also a sculptor, she lives in Chicago and Milwaukee. Her work can be found online at www.anneshaw.org and anneshaw.carbonmade.com.