Review: Rue by Kathryn Nuernberger

Review by Roy White

Rue
Kathryn Nuernberger
BOA Editions, April 2020.
$17.00, 99 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-942683-97-1

I’ve read that torturers come to like their work and any
of us could, because we don’t have a way to understand
another person’s pain and we really want to understand
each other.

This sinister formulation is the first of many in Kathryn Nuernberger’s new book Rue probing the virtues and limitations of empathy. The book’s second poem, “I Am Worried About You in the Only Language I Know How,” gives a narrative illustration. A young woman is led off by a man (her boyfriend?), leaving her duffel bag on a park bench. The watching speaker is at first concerned about the unattended luggage, that taboo of our century, but then notices the woman and man talking to three other men, standing next to a van. But the speaker is distracted by her own small daughter, climbing about on a rather scary playground apparatus, and when she looks back the van and the people are gone: “I’m worried about her / and all those backward glances. Because I’ve followed / men I shouldn’t have trusted to places I didn’t think / I could leave either.”  And the reader is worried too, having perhaps been at some time too slow-witted or timid to help a person in need. But if neither our empathy nor the speaker’s can help the young woman, what use is it? This haunting poem leaves us to find our own answer.

Rue confronts, one might say agonizes over, the question how much women and men can understand each other when what women have to say is filtered or stifled and what men have to say so often comes in the form of aggression. In “I Want to Learn How” the speaker likes to sit at a coffee shop where a man named Glen likes to greet her in a friendly way and then touch her in ways that make her very uncomfortable. Her dilemma is complicated by the fact that Glen is a bigwig in a one-coffee-shop town where the speaker is an outsider (many of the pieces are set in lonely places “two hours from anybody who likes me”). Nuernberger presents the problem using a contrast of linguistic registers, from the absurdly simple terms in which the speaker’s response will be interpreted, “nice” (compliant) vs. “mean” (other) to her own description in language (“micro-aggressive sexists perpetuating a patriarchal social system”) that would be utterly alien to Glen and his friends and even pushes against notions of poetic diction. The male co-workers to whom she turns for advice or just recognition manage to put on suitably sad faces but are ultimately dismissive. Male readers will be tempted to think that we get it, that we would say or do the right thing; the poem whispers that all we would offer is a more convincing performance of empathy, but maybe that would be enough.

The collection’s title poem is one of a series devoted to herbal abortifacients. As Nuernberger says in “The Real Thing”:

I’ve been reading about hallucinatory flowers
lately, particularly the ones used by medieval
midwives to induce abortion. This because
I like irony, I like control, and I like to see
a woman flipping the patriarchy the bird.

These pieces also give the author a chance to exercise her flair for the recherché and her love of anaphora: “Pennyroyal, called Run-by-the-Ground. / Pennyroyal, called Lurk-in-the-Ditch. /  Pennyroyal, “It creepeth much” and “groweth much…. / Pennyroyal, drunk with wine for venomous bites.”

These botanical poems often lack the emotional urgency of the contemporary pieces because, as Nuernberger herself laments, the voices of the midwives themselves and their perhaps desperate clients have been elided from history. They are most successful when the poet is able to produce a human protagonist; in “Columbine” the plant’s namesake is a commedia dell’arte character entangled in dramas of courtship and abuse that resonate with the modern speaker: “as usual, we are at a loss for words as to why / we made some choices but not others, gave / ourselves over to this clown but not that one.”

In “The Bird of Paradise,” we are introduced to Maria Merian, a pioneering botanist who traveled to Suriname and returned accompanied by an indigenous woman. She is in some ways a heroic figure, with an ecological perspective ahead of her time, but in a characteristic gesture Nuernberger zooms out to include the colonialist contex, her implication in slavery, and her suppression of the identity of the indigenous companion who must have been a critical informant:

It could have been any of us, but it was her
who lived her life, her who died that life,
her whose name the botanist never once
bothered to write down in a footnote
or journal or dashed-off letter. Most likely
it was her secrets so carelessly given away. 

“Poets I admire have been known to say, / “First thought, best thought.” But if that worked I wouldn’t / need to write at all. If that worked, I could just talk to people.” Despite the witty disclaimer, Nuernberger’s affinity with Ginsberg is evident in both substance and style. She writes frankly about sex, in some ways more frankly than Ginsberg, she writes about having really bad sex and going to sleep angry, which I don’t think he ever did, and about lusting after a nerdy guy in cargo shorts, which I am quite sure he never did.

These are also expansive, even chatty poems, not self-contained rhetorical artifacts. You will not find here a lot of ostentatious sound effects or self-conscious imagery; the poet’s favorite trope is anaphora, and she relies on surpriseing and incongruous juxtapositions of language and subject, on narrative and digression-the tools of a storyteller, or even a comic, if that is understood to be a compliment. She usually avoids poetic diction (nothing is ‘lambent’ or ‘limned’) but otherwise veers all over the linguistic map. “A Difficult Woman” sounds like one of George Saunders’ employment hellscapes:

… because it is a true fact that some
committee of persons hired me and this
because I pretended to be a Professionalism 4
once for an afternoon…

Elsewhere the diction can be quite formal (“a serious conundrum of a moral nature”) or consist of catch-phrases, as in several of the titles (“You Get What You Get and You Don’t Throw a Fit,” e.g.). But what particularly enlivens the tone is Nuernberger’s ability to draw on archaic and fantastic lore, from that “great explorer and liar” Sir John Mandeville to Marco Polo to Pliny and the 17^th-century Dutch ichthyographer Adriaen Coenen. These sources supply the poet with a vivid and sometimes bizarre counterpoint to her modern conundrums of a moral nature.

For instance, the same poem that catalogues Coenen’s fish-lore, such as the sea-bishop with its hat and chasuble, also offers us the giant bird-woman “bigger than / the men shooting their little arrows at her, it almost seems / they are the ones in danger, to study the crook of their smiles.” Maybe, but having met her many sisters in this compelling book, I am worried on behalf of the bird-woman, and so, I suspect, is Nuernberger.

Roy White is a blind person who lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with a lovely human and an affable lab mix. His work has appeared in Poetry, BOAAT Journal, Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere, and he can be found on Twitter at @surrealroy.