Book Reviews: October 2013
Lullaby (with Exit Sign), Poems by Hadara Bar-Nadav
Pain, Porn and Complicity: Women Heroes from Pygmalion to Twilight, Nonfiction by Kathleen McConnell
The Traps, Poems by Louise Mathiasfff
Lullaby (with Exit Sign)
Poems by Hadara Bar-Nadav
Saturnalia Books, March 2013
ISBN-13: 978-0983368663
$15.00; 88pp.
Reviewed by Tara Boswell
Hadara Bar Nadav’s Lullaby (with Exit Sign) is an imploring, self-reflexive collection that forces readers to examine the role and responsibility of the poet. Why write? And with what right do we have to do so? Who do we write for and to what end?
In an 1862 letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson writes:
I smile when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish’—that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin—If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her—if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase—and the approbation of my Dog, would forsake me—then—My Barefoot-Rank is better—
If we consider a woman alone in her room, with her poems tucked away in a drawer, we presume she writing for herself. Bar-Nadav’s book suggests this woman writes for everyone. Here the poet’s work is sacred, so publishing and concerns with status are immaterial.
In the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman claims, “The proof of the poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he absorbed it.” If we consider Walt Whitman’s democratic model—the noble patriot, the poet as a romantic masculine champion—Bar-Nadav’s far more intimate book becomes a feminist piece. She bucks the patriarchy with an invocation of Emily Dickinson that isn’t timid or weak, but observant, receptive, and absorbent without the need to be absorbed affectionately.
Like a poet in the process of composition, Bar-Nadav’s speaker is a raw, exposed nerve. Wracked with grief over familial and historical trauma, she allows herself to translate and echo this trauma as if it were an exorcism. Over the course of four carefully crafted sections, the book builds power through the channeling of ancestral voices. It seems Bar-Nadav’s model of the poet is that of an amanuensis, a female as a vessel, a surviving heir and torch carrier.
The first poem, which is also the title poem, is placed before the first section and serves as a prologue. In “Lullaby (with Exit Sign),” we find the speaker in a state of brokenness:
I slept with all four hooves
the air or I slept like a snail
in my broken shell.
The periphery of the world dissolved.
The speaker is fetal in a trembling, post trauma apocalypse, and these moments of human limitations are staggering. The speaker being subject to an environment that mercilessly takes its toll characterizes many of the poems in the first section. The title poem’s images snap like cinematic cuts and reflect the poet’s keen lens. The line, “what beauty, what bruise” prepares us for what’s to come. And while from the start of the book we are left with an overwhelming sense of despair, the speaker’s survival trumps her victimhood.
The speaker’s communion with the dead is also established in the title poem, with the final lines:
Come through me, my darlings
whatever you are: flame,
lampshade, soap.
Leave your shattered shadows
behind. I’ll be the doorway
that watches you go.
Here Bar-Nadav opens the gate for grief, and the poet’s duty of ancestral translation begins. These lines also are the first of several implicit references to the grotesque crimes of the Holocaust, and make the poet’s role as a surviving vessel even more pressing, as her speaker is often subject to external onslaughts beyond her control.
Similarly, in “I don’t like paradise,” a cycle of collapsing and reconfiguring is introduced. Blood flow breaches a clot, and there is “mother’s puzzled face” and her “maze of surgical welts.” This poem also represents the rejection of the material world: “We are sugary plastic, a shiny Paradise. But I never felt at home in Shiny.” This discomfort is illustrated by “starlings darkly underskin” violently trying to break through; the speaker now battles with her environment and is at the mercy of the animals inside of her. As the book progresses, the push against the man-made and the superficial becomes stronger, and the speaker gives way to the animal to find her footing in these harsh landscapes.
The landscapes of these poems are also explored in the relationship between form and content. Almost all of the poems come packaged in prose blocks and seem to be the poet’s attempt at control in the midst of violent trauma. However, because they appear as prose doesn’t mean these poems are neat. Line breaks would have been too much of a formal gesture for the weight of this book. How, then, does a poet compartmentalize grief? Bar-Nadav’s book seems to argue that she doesn’t, even in elegiac prose. This construction mirrors the surgical remedies to a body ravaged by cancer in “Darkness Intersects Her Face:” “The surgeon had been thorough, neat. She wore her thigh on her cheek, her neck on her forehead, her eyelid cut from her inner arm.” Here, the superficial attempts at control over a body’s cancer are useless because in the end, “behind her mortal bone, a shadow is growing inside of her.”
A similar theme is continued in “Suspension,” where a woman dead and embalmed speaks to us through the inorganic material that has pieced her back together, postmortem. “My open casket mouth packed with putty, fixed,” she says. The word “fixed” is so effective here because of its double meaning. A body in mortuary makeup appears healed, despite the face that she has lost to death: “the way I used to be.” But her death and preservation through embalming has left her voiceless and immobile—fixed as in still and unable. It is here where the poet’s communion with the dead becomes even more essential.
The speaker embraces this mediating role in “Lift the Flesh Door” with a systematic unpacking of the corporeal body that hinders her: “Begin at the divot of the neck and pull up over chin, nose, the wasted eyes; the eyes where sequins lived.” Sequins, like the sugary plastic paradise referenced earlier in the book, represent the superficial materiality that has failed the speaker and her lost loved ones. Her unpacking of the body continues until ribs are “unhooked,” and “the liver tumbles out.” We are left with “soul picked clean of self,” and, like the poet with her craft, in the context of these poems the speaker is a transient scribe. The book hinges on this poem—it is the mark of an empowered transition for the speaker, as it is the first time she takes a full, healthy breath (ironically without the physiological trappings of a human form). The poem ends: “Empty. Breathe—lean against the grave you were.”
Bar-Nadav’s subsequent erasures of material from Emily Dickinson’s Master Letters reflects this breath. The prose block is broken, and white space between floating lines represent omission. Like the “plastic” and “sequins” of the corporeal materiality, Bar-Nadav shaves away the excess, allowing stark moments of femininity in barefoot-rank to rise to the surface.
Pain, Porn and Complicity: Women Heroes from Pygmalion to Twilight
Nonfiction by Kathleen McConnell
Wolsack and Wynn, Ltd., January 2013
ISBN-13: 978-1894987684
$19.00; 196pp.
Reviewed by Edmund Zagorin
It is rare to find a book of critical essays that takes its subject matter as earnestly as Kathleen McConnell takes Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight in Pain, Porn and Complicity: Women Heroes from Pygmalion to Twilight. This is not to say that McConnell’s analysis is glowing or in any way redolent of fandom — which wouldn’t be an unreasonable concern given these shows’ shockingly pervasive cult followings — but rather that these essays manage to address their mass market subject matter with an atypical attention to detail, treating Whedon as seriously as Shakespeare, Meyer as seriously as Wollstonecraft. For any book that genuinely aims at understanding why the disturbing themes of vampires and female bondage have reached such tempestuous heights of popularity in the past few decades, McConnell’s work is precisely the sort of sobering analysis readers might use to decrypt the seduction of careworn Gothic motifs across the North American zeitgeist.
According to McConnell, the situation of women heroes in literature, television, and film is inexorably Gothic. First because all heroes are required to suffer, and the quintessence of Gothic is, drawing on arguments by Michelle A. Massé, “suffering women.” And second because the Gothic requires an element of the Freudian uncanny, which involves characters who are “…indistinguishable from humans, yet are not human.” If the Gothic, as McConnell argues, rests on what Bill Brown calls the “misuse” or excessive quality of objects, it is precisely the extent to which women have been objectified that enables their subversive appearance as Gothic heroines. McConnell makes this argument using a wide variety of textual resources in the book’s five essays that focus respectively on A.I., Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Catwoman, Dark Angel, and Twilight.
McConnell suggests that it is difficult to understand women heroes without recognizing this underlying relationship to the uncanny. This is where the myth of Pygmalion becomes crucial. Originally from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pygmalion follows the existence of a reclusive sculptor who “…reviles women in the flesh, though he idolizes Woman in the abstract.” Pygmalion undertakes putting the labors of his heart to good use and goes about chiseling his ideal woman as a statue, who, once completed, is so utterly lovely that Pygmalion can’t help but fall in love with her
This question is perhaps why McConnell starts with A.I., a text without a female protagonist but where the main character is feminized by his objecthood. As a machine he lacks place in the schema of human agency in approximately the same way as the film’s female characters. Perhaps a fundamental aspect of postmodern literature for McConnell is its reversibility; following a line of argument parallel to the Hyperstitionist CCRU, McConnell demonstrates how literature no longer makes objects out women but rather makes women out of objects, be those objects of flesh seen through the eyes of hungry vampires, objects of salvation in the eyes of a British schoolteacher, objects of lethal force in Dark Angel’s transgenic assassins, or even A.I.’s literal androids. In each text a symbolic objectification interrupts the connection of feminized actors to motherhood, severing the standard set of drives attached to woment within the dominant Freudian roles of patriarchal femininity: wife, mother, daughter. This subversive objecthood, then, signifies a critical emancipatory potential, since even a “…lifelike statue has the potential to be treated as if it has cognitive depth, and is therefore inherently uncanny.”
Hence, the quest to understand women heroes is for McConnell, following Lesley Stern, bound up in our enigmatic need to understand the Thing underlying cinematic presence, the shiver of dislocated objects neither human nor inhuman. Part of what introduces this contrast in A.I. is the focus on the mother-son relationship between Monica and David, the latter whom is a mechanized simulacrum of a human child designed to replace Monica’s terminally ill biological son Martin. When Martin is inevitably cured and returns to find David as unwelcome competition, the latter is expelled from the paradisal strata of this dystopia’s mega-rich to make his own way through the unseemly world of trafficking and “flesh fairs.” McConnell points out that throughout this narrative Monica, the mother, is rendered as little more than a caricature who would make anyone even vaguely familiar with the sexism of vintage “wife” advertising grimace. In a film adapted from Brian Aldiss’ short story “Supertoys Last All Summer” (1969) it is the 2-D rendering of the story’s leading lady which ends up becoming the real supertoy.
Each of McConnell’s essays has its virtues, but only Twilight is remotely timely. While of course no cultural text is by any means ancient history, before Twilight the most recent is 2004 (Catwoman), and like all criticism, it is more a product of its temporal locality than a prisoner of the chosen texts. This is most apparent in the essay on Buffy, which is a wonderfully illuminating piece of analysis that feels suddenly interrupted by an extensive interrogation of the Columbine high school shootings, which took place in April 1999. The effect is intentional, as Columbine was used as a pretext to pull a key Buffy episode from airing, sparking a widespread outrage against media censorship and specifically the scapegoating of Gothic storyline dramas in an attempt to refocus the national debate on gun violence. As McConnell herself wryly notes in 1999, she was an earlycomer to academic writing on Buffy, but in 2012 the essay is one of many stones in the veritable avalanche of Buffy scholarship. Since 1999 Buffy has become the most-cited text in graduate-level cultural studies and even sports its own journal Slayage, promulgated by the Whedon Studies Association.
Returning full circle to the Pygmalion trope, the essay on Twilight capping the text is by far the most incisive, a close reading of the quartet that focuses on how Meyers renders the character of Bella Swan as the passive object of the Cullens, specifically Edward. For McConnell, the novels are a return to the popular Harlequin Romance form of the 1970s, a form characterized by blandly impersonal women protagonists, utterly pliant and submissive yet nevertheless quick-thinking and clever, women who spend a great deal of page time literally preparing food for male characters but are still able to save the day when the men aggressively box themselves into untenable situations. It’s a good analysis, and for those who feel cheated by Meyers’ Bella, McConnell doesn’t mince words outlining the litany of flaws that accompany not only Twilight but the broad cultural conventions which make these books so popular.
The Traps
Poems by Louise Mathias
Four Way Books, April 2013
ISBN-13: 978-1935536291
$15.95; 48pp.
Reviewed by Gina Vaynshteyn
Louise Mathias’ work has been described as an “erotica of trouble,” a description Mathias approves of; poetry that could be considered dangerously personal, an alleged reflection of one’s impossible interior. Somber yet unabashedly unapologetic, The Traps, Mathias’ sophomore collection of poetry, centers around loss, longing, and abandonment while investigating what it means to embrace, and what happens after one lets go.
Mathias’ work is astoundingly lyrical; she pieces together unlikely words, sounds, and images to create a frame of time or single event. “Snuff” conjures the feeling of loneliness by listing smells, colors, and textures:
You can exit the city of ghosts. You can’t exit
a tremor.
A trail of metronome,
& the abalone smell of her, contagious, silver,
A knot
of rope, heavy, the color of oysters, affixed
at the throat.
“Snuff” explores the idea of being able to physically leave yet remaining psychologically pinned to a person, location, or concept. Words such as “contagious,” “fog,” and “bones” dimly light the piece. In the sensual last line, the speaker loses complete control of herself and liquefies: “He poured me, like fluid, into glass.”
Although Mathias rejects narration in its simplest form, “The Canary” detects a shattered family. The speaker observes how “Long nights, I watched my mother tweeze / her legs, not wincing once. Divorce // can make you lucky, like the odds.” Pain, self-inflicted and brought on by exterior forces, drips throughout the collection. The speaker’s mother violently removes the hair from her legs, both asserting her femininity, strong will, and acknowledgement of abandonment.
Parts of The Traps are earthy. Several poems pay tribute to aspects of California and Indiana, celebrating or observing the land. “Elk River Road,” a poem set in Humboldt County, California, providing both vivid and sinister imagery, juxtaposes marigolds to a locked door. This poem celebrates freedom from an enclosed space. The speaker claims
by the voile of the drapes.
Fluttering
all, farmer-ly
The role of the marigolds, the voile.
The Traps is a dynamic collection of poems. In an interview with The Rumpus, Mathias states, “I think [The Traps] is more tonally savage than Lark Apprentice. I’m not so obsessed with beauty anymore, or, to put it differently, my ideas about what beauty is have been complicated.” The poems are indeed confusingly beautiful and morbid, unapologetic and raw. Even the varied poems’ forms are almost unpredictable. Yet, each always ends with a deft punch, a single line or couplet that confirms its finality. The Traps illuminates what is and isn’t there, a hiding place that should be exposed for the world to see.
Reviewer Bios:
Tara Boswell is a New Jersey native who lives and writes in Chicago. She is an Assistant Poetry Editor for Phantom Limb Press, and the online literary journal Ghost Proposal.
Edmund Zagorin is a writer and argument teacher in Detroit, USA and Iowa City, USA. His novelesque Sorry, Our Unicorn Has Rabies is serialized electronically through Jukepop and he curates the monthly print broadsheet Stories By Mail. Read his data-fossils @multiplicit.
Gina Vaynshteyn is currently studying poetry in San Diego and has work published or forthcoming in PANK, Treehouse, Milksugar, and The California Journal of Women Writers. She regularly writes for Hellogiggles and The Rumpus. You should read her thoughts on breakfast cereal and quasi-politics on Twitter @ginainterrupted.