house(hold) by Lindsay Stewart Review by Lawrence Di Stefano
Review of house(hold)
Book by Lindsay Stewart
Published 11/29/22
Eggtooth Editions
Review by Lawrence Di Stefano
The Architecture of Embrace: A review of Lindsay Stewart’s house(hold)
Most homeowners keep, somewhere in their files, in their safes, the blueprint to their house. This rarely referred to document is there for when something structurally needs attending to, and often, repair. In these instances, when the plotter paper is unfolded with the urgency of a question, with the need to understand—out of fear, perhaps—one sees the structure of something drawn out in fine lines—something so familiar, yet rendered entirely new, thus renewed—saved.
Lindsay Stewart’s debut chapbook, house(hold), winner of the 2022 Eggtooth Edition Chapbook Contest, unfolds with the urgency of a poet trying to make sense, to carefully follow a line toward a deeper understanding—or to a corner of a wall with no door, or the line that forms behind you, when, as a child, you paused in fear before stepping onto an escalator, as your mother watched—as in the poem, “A sestina for my recurring tsunami dream”, where Stewart’s choice of form (the sestina) fittingly emulates an anxiety of fear and hesitation, of a mind racing, contemplating its own questions—and of the cyclical nature of the ocean (a recurring theme), with its recycling of the same end words in successfully inventive ways. Refuge, earlier in the poem, reappears as refuse, and disturbed in a later stanza, becomes undeterred in the penultimate one:
………………….The first sign of a tsunami is when, strangled
………………….and quiet, the ocean retreats into itself. My mother
………………….does not know this story, how I have always been afraid—
………………….It’s a good thing she grew out of it a long
………………….time ago—I still take one, two, three disturbed
………………….stairs too long on the escalator, and refuse
………………….the open open ocean. It is less that I am afraid
………………….and more that I sink, heavy, refusing
………………….natural questions and, instead, wonder if the long
………………….high sea wave loves me? She does not crest, strange
………………….and dangerous, instead she gathers, like a mother
………………….and how many waves have swept up my shore, undeterred
The poems in house(hold) draw out and blueprint the vast connections of proximity, line by line—and of memory too, naturally—finding where they cross, intersect, and form, room after room, stanza after stanza, the human underpinnings and its support beams that make a house a home—one with a father, a mother, and a twin-sister in it—all held within its lines, together.
Across this shorter, 16-poem chapbook (the book’s cover features the actual blueprint of the poet’s childhood home), Stewart employs an impressive variety of poetic forms. From Sonnet, Sestina, stichic, and The Duplex to more experimental, free forms, this poet uncovers a complex, human architecture of relation.
Like in “Inheritance”, a tender meditation on the speaker’s relationship with the father, in couplets, the speaker follows the death of their “father’s father” to a deeper understanding of their own relationship via the image of an inherited collection of the grandfather’s landscape paintings left in a storage unit: “For a long time, I couldn’t convince myself that I was/ worth something, so this inheritance, of indisputable worth/ is colossal—so much so that it might carry me for years, the same way/ my father did in the crook of his arm, looking into my eyes and saying/ When are you going to talk?” In the final line, Stewart acknowledges, so appropriately, the “necessity of utterance” that qualifies every poem in this chapbook, which, by its end, are brought together, most profoundly to me as reader, by their universal movement toward unification, of embrace, via the speaker’s drawing out of those invisible connections. Stewart finds the doors between them, but pauses in contemplation, and with care, before stepping through them and into them. A tenderness is, for me, what holds it all together.
From Stewart’s early meditation on the sacrifice of the mother octopus, in “The mother” and in the poems that reinterpret Medusa, like “Imagine Medusa grateful”, we see, unexpectedly, a full breadth and charting of—what I’ve come to interpret as and feel—tenderness. It is something, as Stewart explores and uncovers, that is complex and especially difficult. Perhaps the most challenging thing about tenderness, we come to see, is simply speaking of it.
Like the father in “To the monsters…”, who is “so enamored/with the sea he won’t ever/really talk about it.” Or in the following poem, “Never mind the cradle”, which so beautifully captures the secret, tender language and bond between twins:
………………….A resemblance, a semblance, a sameness, semi-
………………….divine: I am dead one day, and alive the next,
………………….and you fall as I rise. Out of the nine-month
………………….midnight, our mother wondered what language
………………….we were speaking, but it was simple: you were
………………….my alphabet—A was you, B was you, all twenty-six
………………….letters—and when we are apart all of my words
………………….are missing just one nothing can (dissevered)
………………….There is no tragedy quite like a word unfinished.
Stewart demonstrates across this chapbook how language holds. How it is, like a house, full of our own memory, which is also, as we come to see, full of fear and vulnerability. What keeps it standing and structurally sound are the images, the figures the speaker speaks to—as in the penultimate poem, “An encyclopedia of my mother and other immovable objects”, a six-part poem that simultaneously looks at the mother, as well as the history of The Golden Gate Bridge:
………………….As far as I’m concerned my mother is
………………….god the edges of her body are where all
………………….the maps begin My mother is
………………….gravity I go still each time her fingers
………………….settle on my shoulders and she is
………………….what’s between before
………………….and after As far as I’m concerned
………………….my mother is quietly making and
………………….unmaking the world in the next room
and in the final poem, “After Disaster”, a short poem where the speaker questions, “Will there be a quiet winter? Will there/be a silent spring? It will matter little if/there are no little houses left to hear it./The smoke has stolen our air and what’s left/we use to keep each other afloat.”
Stewart, in this little chapbook (which is a little air), keeps all it examines held together, afloat, drawing out a complex architecture of embrace—one that is structurally, sound.
Lindsay Stewart grew up in Glen Ellen, California. She earned her B.A. in English and her secondary teaching credential from the University of San Diego. She earned her M.A. in American Literature from San Diego State University. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Tar River Poetry, Spillway, and Red Wheelbarrow and was featured on an episode of the Poetry Foundation’s VS podcast.
Lawrence Di Stefano’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in RHINO, Southern Humanities Review,Bear Review,STIRRING, and Santa Clara Review, among other journals. He holds an MFA in poetry from San Diego State University. He is currently working on his debut chapbook, Relapsing Green.
25 January 2023
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