Brocken Spectre by Jacques J. Rancourt Book Review by Erica Charis-Molling

Brocken Spectre 

by Jacques J. Rancourt

Alice James Books

100 Pages

September 14, 2021

ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1948579209

Review by Erica Charis-Molling

What does it mean to love when one’s love has intimate ties to the spectre of death? This is one of the central questions that haunts Jacques J. Rancourt’s Brocken Spectre. Much like the phenomenon after which the collection is titled, the search for answers is part ghost hunt and part investigation of an illusion. Through the eyes of these post-AIDS-epidemic poems, we thoughtfully look at the ways the virus is both a thing of the past and very much present. “The guidebook says we might be haunted / if the mist and the light / are just right…” the closing poem says, still undecided whether the fear and grief of a generation is more of a looming haunted shadow or a rainbow mirage.

In the world of Rancourt’s poems, places hold memory and the past persists, whether acknowledged or not. Time shifts and stretches and bends whether walking through a park with the beloved, cruising down bathhouse hallways, club hopping in the Castro district, or making love in a car. In the poem “Near the End of the Century,” we read: “…Time is elastic: / either it’s 1994, or it’s 1980 / or it was just last night, / it makes no difference…” As we follow the “someone” of this poem as they walk away from “everything they know” towards a world of bass drums, mascara, runways, and disco balls, there’s no way to know if AIDS is in their past, present, future, or somehow all three at once. All we’re told by the party’s host-turned-preacher is that in this moment “…The old world / has passed away— / Behold! All things have been / made new.”

The poem closes with a double negative: they (and we) have no reason not to believe this Pauline pronouncement. This brush with Biblical language and the nature of belief is not a chance encounter. Faith and doubt of the Christian persuasion are another constant thread through the book’s examination of self and contemporary U.S. culture. The poems in this collection shift position and bend the light, wrestling with what to believe of the rainbow promises of “never again.” The God of these poems “watches over us from space like a meteor in orbit / Or the large sad eye of Jupiter.” Yet like a persistent ghost, the former faith of the speaker keeps coming back. While watching a go-go dancer in an empty bar, the speaker confesses: “I still, somehow, believe in the soul, / which transcends the body & triumphs / over death, which lingers over everything…” 

Belief persists, even in the face of interrogation through suffering, illness, and death. Even as the speaker identifies with those who hold a deep and fervent faith, he wonders “& how far from the cathedral did the pilgrims walk / before they realized they still could not walk?” Here the paradox of belief on which so many of the poems twist and spin: a faith that can animate the ailing body, but can (perhaps will) also tragically fail it. There is much of the “everything for a reason” theology that falls flat in the presence of real, seismic loss. Yet, here is another ghost or trick of perception that the speaker can’t seem to shake. When struggling with survivor’s guilt, the speaker can’t help but try to attribute a sense of order to loss musing, “but what does this have to do with God? / I was careless, yes, & spared.”

Whether haunted by a past epidemic or the God of one’s former faith, these spectres refuse to disappear from view. Even as these experiences recede in the rear view mirror, they are always present. In “Triptych of our first date in which a man dies from cardiac arrest,” where once again love and death draw close, the speaker names ex nihilo the ultimate myth we tell ourselves. “…though a universe / of zero size, one argument goes, comes as close / to nothing as we can get / it is still not nothing.” The double negative elegantly insists that there must always a before—though all we know for sure about such a universe is the nothing it is not. Determining what sort of something it is, well that work is left to each reader.

And make no mistake: remaining open to the elegiac undercurrent running beneath every mundane, tragic, or joyous moment is work. In trying to process two losses at once, the lives lost in the Pulse massacre and the passing of a beloved pet, the speaker confesses “If there is just one thing / I should not grow accustomed to, / I am telling you now, / I have.” There are ways in which repeated trauma can numb its witness, even (perhaps especially) those who are the most open and sensitive to its impact. In considering the relentless parade of death, the poet writes “Snow falls. Termites eat out the tree’s / giant heart. I wish I could promise / to remain unchanged had the plague passed / through me…” Here even the hypothetical is elegized as the lineage of guilt and grief continue to find their way into the present. Another poem asserts “…It’s wrong, / I know, to fall in love / with someone while someone else is dying,” and yet this too is a part of the process. The continuation of life and love in the after.

The most moving part of this collection to me is that Rancourt stands in a middle generation—those whose “first understanding of what it meant to be queer was what it meant to die” 1 but who came of age as AIDS prevention and mitigation began to turn the tide of the epidemic. These gay men stand in a liminal space and like the poet know “that six hundred thirty-six / thousand of us died & I did not / know a single one.” Those who bear the marks of secondary trauma through witness, grieve and try to heal from a collective wound that feels as if it doesn’t belong to them. This generation is distinct from those who “came out after” who live and love “…As if none of this / ever happened.” Into this middle ground Rancourt brings his readers, asking more questions than offering answers. In this invitation another type of faith is at work: a faith in the writing process and a faith in the readers to transform those questions into a force that can make all things new. Perhaps there is power in naming the ghost or the science behind the illusion that doesn’t destroy all of its rainbow-haloed mystery. The poet writes, “Between the pages of history / where once I tried to write some lines / in an attempt to save my life // which, having done so, I could not forsake.” Does he mean he couldn’t forsake history, writing, or his very life? For the sake of all his readers—past, present, and future—I hope the answer is simply yes.

1. Mehrish, Divya. “A Conversation with Jacques J. Rancourt.” Adroit Journal, Issue 39.

Erica Charis-Molling is a lesbian poet, educator, and librarian. Her writing has been published in literary journals including Tinderbox, Redivider, Vinyl, and Entropy. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in the 2021 Orison anthology. A Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, she received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch University. Her chapbook, How We Burn, will be published as a part of the Robin Becker Series at Seven Kitchens Press in 2022.

19 January 2022