Book Review: Marvels of the Invisible by Jenny Molberg

Reviewed by Tyler Robert Sheldon

Marvels of the Invisible
Poems by Jenny Molberg
Tupelo Press, February 2017
$16.95; 78 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1936797929

Jenny Molberg’s debut poetry collection Marvels of the Invisible grapples with generational hardships, medical afflictions, faith, and relationships to others. Winner of Tupelo Press’s well-regarded Berkshire Prize, this collection explores the speaker’s relationship to a daughter and her parents. Marvels of the Invisible is a hard-eyed look at what ails these other characters, and how the world around them is affected.

The opening poem, “Echolocation,” establishes the ocean as metaphor for that stilted world: “I think of you, my lost girl, when the wing / of a tailfin rises beside the boat, dripping / in salted robes.” The speaker knows that her child recognizes her true place, perhaps more so than the mother: “A child / hears her home in clefs of water, in whale song: / . . . the loudest blues / on earth.” These descriptions turn dark later in the poem, becoming literal. The narrator’s fear is palpable in Molberg’s efficient language: “Nothing on the sonogram for weeks. / The nurse’s dull hand like a river stone / on my belly.” Biblical allusions turn that fear to anger, and still later the narrator is “prey in the hot slick belly of the sea,” helpless in the face of unalterable circumstances. This relationship, and the lens of the whale and the sea, inform large portions of the collection.

The speaker also works through afflictions visited upon her mother, whose double mastectomy is likened to her father’s childhood examination of ants. In the collection’s title poem, “My father is six years old. The light / spills in as he bends over the microscope / and folds a single ant onto a plastic slide.” Later these examinations come full-circle, and it is the speaker who marvels: “[My father] shows me the room full of microscopes. / I imagine his eye, how it descends / like a dark blue planet.” As he stands sentinel over the speaker’s mother, he “matches his breath with hers, / as they do each night / in the slow river of a breathing house / and beneath her skin, her blood blossoms.”

The speaker’s relationships become complicated in “Necrosis,” where ailments seem to seek out the family. Doctors see mainly bad news through their microscope lenses, and Molberg writes, “You, microscope, are a hungry priest. / . . . Only God’s fingers could become so small.” The narrator continues: “I could see Him in a young girl’s / bone marrow. / Her cells swelled, / vacuolized: ribosomes, cytoplasm, leaking / like spilled jelly.” To the speaker, the child’s medical afflictions are so ruthlessly efficient that they seem intelligent.

When more of the daughter’s circumstances are revealed in “Superficial Heart,” the narrator’s difficulties are compounded: coping with more than most will ever know, she witnesses a crucial anomaly. “It’s monstrous already, the human heart,” she confides, “so think / of the child born with her heart outside her body.” The mother knows it must be protected: “with two pillows, she dams / the heart . . . a tremor / of water, impossible to hold or protect.” When the child passes away, the speaker thinks on what might have been: “If only she’d lived. / . . . her mother / would wade with her into the pond, or let her / whisk the eggs for breakfast.” Knowing and grieving, this mother’s imagination blooms with daily reminders of an empty place.

The speaker finds mirrors throughout this collection, perhaps most notably in “Her Hand, The Compass,” where a friend shares her ever-knowing grief. She explains, “My neighbor walks with wide steps around the yellow crocuses, / moves her hand over the life that kicks in her. // She doesn’t know that this child will never be born.” In her garden, this neighbor paints the world for her child, much as the narrator does for her own:

Here, the lights
will only stun you a minute. You will shoot up like thyme

and tangle with the world where everything
wants to be meant for something bigger.

Even for so much absence, the narrator’s family is united through the metaphor of nesting dolls in the poem “Matryoshka.” She empathizes with their struggles, seeing yet another mirror: those qualities her family possesses that she sees also within herself. She notes, “When you take away the children / the mother is empty.” More specifically still, she observes, “If you look closer, a thin line / cuts the rose. This is where / the mother is broken.” Later, when the speaker puts these nesting dolls back together, the connections emerge: “Each mother / becomes my daughter and I become / each mother.” She whispers to the reader,

I have seen how small
I can be. I will put
the wooden child back inside me.
And the woman inside me. And the woman
inside me. And the woman inside me.

These nesting dolls paint a painful, if cathartic portrait for the narrator: she is her family, and her family is her. Their weaknesses, but also their great strengths, bind her life together.

The collection’s final poem, “Storm Coming,” holds true to these cyclical principles. The narrator finds resemblance to her father, who in turn seeks communion with his own father through personal ritual: “I’ve seen the way he is / with his father. He counts down the lightning” as he reaches to the past. “Dad, he’ll say, how about next time // we’ll go and get some of those peaches you like, / out by the highway? He’ll laugh a laugh // that knows its own ending.” The speaker also finds communion with family. As Molberg shows us in bright color, these connections are the world—even if in the end “we don’t have time to love it.” Marvels of the Invisible creates a vivid world worthy of love, in all its transient brilliance.

Tyler Sheldon is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of First Breaths of Arrival (Oil Hill Press, 2016) and Traumas (Yellow Flag Press, 2017). His poems, fiction, and reviews have appeared in Quiddity International Literary Journal, Coal City Review, The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, The Dos Passos Review, Entropy Magazine, and other publications. He earned his MA in English at Emporia State University, where he studied with Kansas Poet Laureate Kevin Rabas, and is currently an MFA candidate at McNeese State University.