Book Review: Please Bury Me In This by Allison Benis White

Reviewed by Sarah Appleton

Please Bury Me In This
Poems by Allison Benis White
Four Way Books, March 7, 2017
$15.95; 72 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1935536833

Allison Benis White’s Please Bury Me In This (the title taken from a note a friend pinned to a dress before committing suicide) reads as letters to the four women who all took their lives within a year of each other, her recently deceased father, and the trauma inherited as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Although one can sometimes distinguish between the moments the narrator mourns her father and those about the women in her life who have committed suicide, the mourning pools together. The grief becomes collective. White also incorporates the words of famous women writers who have committed suicide—Woolf, Sexton, Plath—as well as news stories of women’s suicides or attempted ones, which further build the collectiveness of this trauma. White reveals how suicide pervades like a contagious disease, as her epigraph, a quote from a 2014 New York Times article, says. Present, too, is the narrator’s own struggle with depression and grief.

The book is an elegy of sorts as well as a means by which White comes to terms with her grief. “At the bottom of suffering,” the narrator writes, “like a lake, there is a ring and I am reaching /down.” The poems serve as a way of healing while turning grief into something luminous and transcendent. “[T]he poem becomes a house, a compulsion to live,” and the place where the narrator can make meaning from her pain. But the narrator also speaks of the danger to herself in grappling with these painful deaths. “Someday I believe,” she writes, “in order to be free, what I say will trample me.”

Inherent to the poems is the narrator’s struggle with her grief and her position as a survivor. “I am trying to understand sentences as paintings of windows in the / room where I’m alive,” the narrator states. This aliveness is a constant, something she must make meaning of as a survivor, so the letters written to the deceased serve different functions. “This is a love letter,” the narrator says at one point, and then later, “I mean these are death letters.” The narrator also indicates that the letters become “an act of immolation, relief,” but also that she is “writing to disappear.” Eventually, she says, “I am writing to you as an act of ending.” These at times conflicting reasons for writing reveal just how much the narrator wrestles with these deaths. As the one who has survived, what can she do to remember these women, her father, and those who died in concentration camps? How can she give voice to those who can no longer speak?

In many ways, her poems—her mouth—give voice to those who can no longer speak. The narrator reads “[a] Sexton quote (soft and full as beer)” and says, “I could put my mouth over the/words.” As she reads Woolf, she contemplates Woolf’s mind, “lowering over [her] mind,” and she is subsumed by another’s experience when “[e]ven briefly [she] love[s] with someone else’s mind.” She moves her “lips as [she] read[s] the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and/sending a splash of water over the beach.” By speaking Woolf’s words in her absence, the narrator is able to love, to feel ecstasy, as Woolf did. But the mouth comes to fail the narrator. “I don’t know how to explain the mouth anymore,” she writes late in the book as she rips a letter down the spine “[u]ntil the page is wet and red, repeated in ink, The mouth is made to be/broken.” Still, in the final line, the narrator beseeches, “Tell me everything now before you go: word by word the mouth assembles the soul.” Like the yous the narrator has been writing to all along, the narrator is now leaving us but not before her words—and her mouth—have assembled the souls of the dead for us to remember.

There’s a fluidity to White’s assemblage of souls; the poems meld together just as White melds her grief for each individual who has died, so the text essentially feels like one long poem. “The gentle shatter as you pass through,” the narrator thinks about midway through the text, “Self-inflicted, but slowly, like cutting two holes in paper for eyes.” In the same poem, “I want to be alive inside the looking” is written on the mirror, and the narrator thinks, “we must make meaning to survive” and that “the face is a compression of miracles.” At the end of the collection, the narrator is “[c]utting faces out of paper and folding them in envelopes like/thoughts.” As she cuts another face, she remembers Clarice Lispector asking in The Hour of the Star, “Am I monster…or is/this what it means to be human?”, and she thinks to herself that this is what it means “[t]o be alive.” In her hands, the paper face comes to life, a miracle: “What makes the shape become visible, and breathe, is the angle and/variation of absence.” The paper faces repeat poems apart, and the narrator continues to meditate on what it takes to be alive and to be the survivor. She comes to embody those she has lost. “I am you gone,” she realizes when she cuts the paper faces.

The entire collection dwells on the variation of absence in White’s life, and the language she uses is just as lyrical, moving, and original as in her earlier work. Like White, we survive, and after reading her poems, the reader is left pondering what it means to be a survivor, to live, to be alive, and in order to do so, one feels compelled to read White’s poems over and over again.

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.