If Some God Shakes Your House by Jennifer Franklin Review by Gillian Perry

If Some God Shakes Your House by Jennifer Franklin

Review by Gillian Perry

Publisher: Four Way Books

Publication Date: March 2023

ISBN: 978-1954245488

Pages: 96

A Window, An Open House

Jennifer Franklin’s collection opens, “I’m not greedy. I will go/when I’m led from the city// to the tomb. I don’t want/ glory. They have never// understood me. It’s not/ a death wish that made me// tend to you, my love,/ even though I knew//  nothing could save you./ I couldn’t let go—“ (1). This spirit of sacrifice, tenderness, urgency and inevitability animate the lines in Franklin’s collection, drawing us closer. But as we establish intimacy with the speaker, we also gain a sense of the largeness of her experience. Speaking “[a]s Antigone” and alternating between ruminations of various objects as “Momento Mori,” Franklin uses antiquity, archetype, allusion, and her powerful voice as her lenses to widen the art of her care and the art of her pain. As the film clears from each vantage point, the reader understands each point of view as adding texture and depth to the truth that the immensity of her caretaking has stripped our speaker of herself. And yet still, she speaks. This imperative to listen, to bear witness to this sharp and intelligent speaker, hurls this collection forward to moments of beautiful reckoning and inevitable despair.

Franklin speaks in the voice of Antigone as a lens to view her speaker’s personal history. Antigone offers the archetype with which Franklin re-examines the characters in her life—her father, her loves, her choices, her assertions. Antigone’s sacrifices in the name of honor and love offer a voice for this speaker, but not necessarily a pedestal. These poems operate as landing places for the speaker to analyze the depth of her own sacrifice, to consider herself and her mythos. This is only built upon with the Memento Moris, which operate as twisted odes. The speaker reflects on snippets of news, memories, and her personal museum of objects, not to exalt them, but to direct her towards the inevitability of death. But this isolation of tragedies, the dig for meaning in this inevitability, is what brings the speaker to lovely, earned conclusions like that in “Memento Mori: Northern White Rhinos;” “…Each time they lower/ their heavy bodies down to rest—/ they sleep, tusks touching. Love,/ what do any of us have but this?” (52). By speaking in a storied voice, cataloging the symbols that have painted her perspective, and then moving into prose to document months of contemplation, political and climate distress, and the routine sacrifices, Franklin has widened the aperture. The blend of form and subject artfully zooms out to capture the wholeness of this speaker—she is both a fulsome character and yet only her sacrifice. 

These poems benefit from a blurring of “you.” First, “you” are a doomed love (“It’s not/ a death wish that made me// tend to you, my love,/” ). By the end of the collection, the reader can surmise this “you” as the speaker’s disabled daughter. However, the nebulosity in introducing “you” as both “my love” and someone to “tend to” offers the reading that you could be both a partner and a child. This texture introduces the pain of gendered labor from its first lines. Franklin builds on this by introducing “my daughter” (“My daughter waits for her short yellow bus that arrives each morning with one sobbing boy” (9)) in “February,” and then again narrating “you” in the next “Memento Mori: Moth”: “…I cannot forget/your face as you pinch the fluttering wings,/oblivious to the suffering you cause” (12). On a first read, it’s easy to separate these yous. But a more nuanced reading, that you can be daughter, father, or mother, offers the dimensionality that makes these poems so gripping.

Which “you” ultimately holds the blame for the speaker’s suffering? Is it the “you” that chastises, “You are as stubborn as your father/ and will not listen. You want bulbs to transform in their soil to emerge/ as different flowers” (19) ?  Is it the you that haunts, forcing the reader to admit, “…I needed/ some way to quiet/ your terrible voice” (49). Or is it the speaker turning her finger back upon herself, “When you said you know/ you are not a narcissist/ because you are a masochist…” (82)? What connects all of these perspectives is that they are speaking to some source of both suffering and caretaking that the speaker takes on. It is the duality of pain and love and Franklin’s argument of their fated harmony, that is fundamental to the speaker’s relationship with every you. It was only in the last few poems that I realized the obvious. As a reader, I too, was a you. In this way, Franklin’s collection joins the Memento Moris—in contending with death, the speaker is reminded of its inevitability. In the charge to share this contention with her readers, to give us a piece of herself through her poetry, we join the chorus of voices for the speaker to tend to.

The final lines of the collection read, “Every ersatz saint knows/ endless sacrifice/ is suicide” (96). The alliteration here—saint, sacrifice, suicide— acts as a pulse, a final tolling of bells, a rhythm of dirt filling a plot, burying a coffin. However, the finality of these lines seems to transcend the disappearance they imply. As Antigone, the speaker’s sacrifice lives on. As Antigone, the speaker’s love demands space on the page, doomed and inevitable as it may be. Like myth, like song, Franklin, “…set[s] small fires with words” (58). So while the speaker may be invisible, her song rings clear. Franklin’s artful use of perspective and preservation makes this collection a living, breathing, panoramic archive. Though some God has thrown the doors open, Franklin gives us every lens to see the past, present, and future of her house. While ever still, we have a window to look back inside.

Jennifer Franklin has published three full-length collections, most recently, If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, March 2023). With Nicole Callihan & Pichchenda Bao, she co-edited the anthology, Braving the Body (Harbor Editions, March 2024). In 2021, she received both a Cafe Royal Foundation Grant in Literature and a NYFA/City Artist Corps Grant in Poetry. Her work has been published widely in anthologies, print publications, and online including in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, Poetry Society’s “Poetry in Motion,” and Prairie Schooner. Diane Seuss chose one of Franklin’s poems for The Academy of American Poets “poem-a-day” series in March 2023. Most recently, her poem, “Memento Mori: Apple Orchard” was included in the eco-poetry section of the Beford Introduction to Literature (Macmillian, 2024).

She holds an AB from Brown University and an MFA from Columbia University where she was the Harvey Baker Fellow. For the past ten years, she has taught manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she runs the reading series and serves as Program Director. She also teaches craft workshops in Manhattanville’s MFA program and 24 Pearl Street of Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She lives in New York City with her husband, their daughter, and their rescue pit bull, Dottie.

Gillian Perry is a writer and teacher from California, and a graduate of the MFA program in fiction at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. You can find her writing in Cleaver Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, and the Carolina Quarterly. Her story “Somatics” was nominated for the Best of the Net 2023 Anthology and the 2024 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.

24 April 2024