
Book Review: Dandarians by Lee Ann Roripaugh
Dandarians
Poems by Lee Ann Roripaugh
Milkweed Editions, September 2014
ISBN-13: 978-1571314581
$16.00; 112pp.
Reviewed by Alyse Bensel
Richly immersed in the language it interrogates, Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Dandarians fluctuates between lyric essay and poem to build a personal history within the realm of (mis)understanding. The opening poem, “The Planet of Dandar,” (and the poems that begin each of the collection’s five sections) provides a guiding light for the reader; words grow slippery even within more narrative forms and through the filter of another language. Each block stanza serves as its own moment, as the speaker makes associative leaps from her mother’s pronunciation of the word dandelion to television and reading Ray Bradbury. Dandelions are likened to creatures that attempt to take over the yard, and yet are also likened to the speaker’s family itself, which becomes citizens members of the planet Dandar. With this understanding is an inherent failure: “Here’s my universal translation device. Although when fog threads the streets like a rough, shaggy yarn too unruly to slip through the eye of a sewing needle, the reception becomes white static and everything garbles to Babel.” The ability to translate between daughter and mother, and the world outside the home, all seem at odds with one another.
Weaving in the familial, Roripaugh remains engaged in conversation with the literary. In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Vermillion River,” the speaker observes how “The trees are beaded in bright drops of water, the leftover dead leaves that still cling to branches look like strategically arranged shreds of handmade Japanese paper—all texture and transparency.” The image serves as a stunning layering of the human-made on top of the natural, which is furthered through actual punctuation, such as in the ninth section, when a turtle “slides off the rock into the water, and a spume of silt curlicues like a silky question mark. Of course, I know the question. But do you have an answer?”
Although a seemingly quiet meditation, Dandarians acts as a form of political resistance in bridging the gap between cursory understanding and truly knowing enough to have the words for experience. “Femanint” explores the word feminine as expressed through the speaker’s mother as well as the speaker’s own trauma of assault. The speaker thinks “Femanint is the strict drag of the überfemme: a corseted binding together of rigid midcentury standards for American and Japanese femininity.” After an encounter with the neighbor’s son (“The things he does to me I have no names for yet.”), the speaker is blamed for her actions, her lack of understanding, until “Something in me has fractured open, like a chocolate orange. I slam my head against the hallway wall, over and over, as hard as I can.” She becomes a Lee Aster, dangerous and on her guard. Even in language’s slippery grasp, there is the prospect of being able to use language through ever questioning it, never letting it settle.
Alyse Bensel is the author of two chapbooks, Not of Their Own Making (Dancing Girl Press, 2014) and Shift (Plan B Press, 2012). Her poetry has recently appeared in Mid-American Review, Heavy Feather Review, and Ruminate, among others. She serves as the Book Review Editor at The Los Angeles Review and Co-Editor of Beecher’s, and is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Kansas.