Book Review: In Which I Play the Runaway by Rochelle Hurt

Reviewed by Sarah Appleton

In Which I Play the Runaway
Poems by Rochelle Hurt
Barrow Street Press, November 2016
$16.95; 94 pp.
ISBN: 978-0-9973184-2-5

Rochelle Hurt’s second poetry collection, In Which I Play the Runaway, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize, circles around home and the often traumatic forces at play in home’s creation. Almost always, danger lurks: these poems are haunted by pistols and guns, damaging men and damaged women, broken and disintegrating relationships. Central to this collection, too, is a modern day Dorothy who struggles to come to an understanding of home and her place in the world. In “Dorothy Tries,” Dorothy is addressed in second person. “By now your feet are swollen,” the narrator observes,

to the size of pomegranates,
pulsing fuchsia inside

hand-me-down pumps.
They’ll callous your feet in no time.
How cheap you look.

Both familiar and startlingly commonplace, Hurt’s Dorothy becomes a Midwestern everygirl, the kind of girl staggering down the street searching for home in ill-fitting pumps. Hurt’s Dorothy also encompasses one of the central tensions in the collection: failing love. “If I could // find my heart…I could make it love you,” Dorothy thinks. Her fruitless searching for her disembodied heart mirrors the narrator’s fraught relationships as well as her parents’ failing, then failed, marriage.

Befitting the violence of a destroyed home, pistols, guns, and bullets shoot through the poems both literally and metaphorically. “[W]e hid / words like bullets under our tongues,” the narrator reflects in “Self-portrait in Aimwell, Alabama”; she thinks that one word bullet “must have lodged in her [mother’s] spine / before we were born—love, our aim / ever fixed on our father’s eyes.” This bullet threatens, as the sisters take aim at their father but are not crippled in the same way as their mother. Elsewhere, these weapons simultaneously threaten and empower; in “No Place (Dorothy Remembers),” the narrator notes, “With the past / like a pistol at your back / anyone can be brave.” And in one of the final poems, “Self-portrait in Miracle, Kentucky”: “Home is a bullet I swallow again and again, hoping / to emerge unbroken from where I’ve been: trapped/in houses that fall like people.” In these poems, firearms become placebos to draw strength from, but firearms are dangerous, too, when they drive one forward.

The hands of men are another threat; they toy with women or else turn them to ragdolls. In the titular poem, the narrator writes of the man she’s inadvertently made “a home in” that “[t]he scent / of him alone was like coming / home to a father’s midnight grip,” which implies both the violence of her relationship with her father as well as the toxic nature of this present relationship. In the lover’s hands, she becomes “forever / the runaway, indolent trinket of his.” The narrator remembers in “Self-portrait in Aimwell, Alabama” how her mother “folded herself like a paper napkin into [her husband’s] palm,” and later, in “Self-portrait in Nightmute, Alaska,” a man the narrator doesn’t know unfolds her mother “like an old tablecloth, shaking the other men out, leaving/his name like a grease stain.” But fathers suffer, too. In “Some Oz,” the narrator imagines a father waking to “a home // inescapable…wearing [his] father’s face” with “hands full of years like salvage.” Salvage here is junk, refuse. The relationships between husbands and wives and a father and his daughters are never salvaged—or solved—in these poems. Instead, home remains a place where hands do damage, where a mother “falls // infinitely further inward” in “Diorama of a Fire,” and where “a daughter’s life is spent / sifting the wreckage of meaning heaped between her teeth” in “The Language of Daughters” as she tries, and succeeds to some degree, to make sense of her world.

Throughout these poems, the narrator also questions her agency and identity. In the prose poem “Bad Luck,” the narrator examines herself as a woman alongside her mother. The narrator sees regret in her mother’s belly curled “stone-still, like a child/carried too long,” and she understands “a / woman’s body as a bowl, open to whatever may fall into it.” But where the narrator presumes an absence of agency, the mother responds otherwise: “But loss is / a choice . . . to become the haunt you’ve run from.” The narrator does not immediately claim this loss-fueled agency, and her struggle to do so can be seen through Dorothy. In “Dorothy in the Desert,” Dorothy’s desire for agency is an accusation more than anything:

Lost is the word you try,
but when you open your mouth,
language rolls down your chin
like cud, splintered with shreds
of unfamiliar syllables. You wanted
to be only your own. Didn’t you.

The accusation of wanting independence, the accusation of “Didn’t you” that might otherwise be a question but here is a declarative statement, is intended to make Dorothy feel like a foolish failure. In tandem with Dorothy, the narrator constantly reviews her own identity and agency in self-portraits. She sees herself as pluralized. “builds a daughter’s house: beams of I like fingers accuse / each other in circular rooms,” begins “The Language of Daughters,” which not only drops the reader into disorienting syntax, but also into a house predicated on accusation from multiple “I”s. In “Self-portrait in Story, Wyoming,” the narrator says, “[I]n my ribs, I’ve lassoed and fenced / all the women I’ve been. I swear / they have never ceased / to believe they exist.”

One can so easily imagine Dorothy in her blue gingham dress clicking her ruby shoes together and saying, “There’s no place like home.” But, by far, the sentiment is different here; home is called entirely into question. Dorothy is stripped of her naiveté and blind desire. She is forced, instead, to question who she is and who those around her are, just as the narrator parses her hurt and trauma seeking always to make sense of it. In Which I Play the Runaway is a nuanced picture of home and identity rendered with striking—sometimes beautiful, sometimes searing—language. There are lines the reader can feel on their tongue, as in “Self-portrait in Hurt, Virginia”—“I was born a fleck of mill trash / bedded in a black hill, a cry / stoppered with crabgrass”—that make the narrator’s plight visceral and bodily. Perhaps this line, later in the poem, sums the collection up most: “You’ll never tell home from hurt, / my father said. His kiss was a curse / placed on my mother’s forehead.” The hurt the narrator’s father speaks of spirals outward from that cursing kiss; it pervades the narrator’s life, from her childhood home and dissolution of her parents’ marriage to her own broken relationships. The collection is one to return to again and again, not only to be tantalized by Hurt’s language and lingering imagery but also to question one’s own ideas of self, identity, and home.

Sarah Appleton earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at Western Washington University. Her writing projects focus on memory, family, and feminism. She currently teaches at Cranbrook Kingswood School, where she lives with her fiancé and beautiful Australian Shepherd, Zoë. You can find her @sarahkapples on Twitter.