Story & Bone by Deborah Leipziger Review by Robin Rosen Chang
Story & Bone by Deborah Leipziger
Review by Robin Rosen Chang
Publisher: Lily Poetry Review Books
Publication Date: January 10, 2023
ISBN: 1957755105
Pages: 76
Deborah Leipziger’s stunning second poetry collection, Story & Bone (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022), delves into matters at the core of our very being. It explores identity, heritage, and belonging through careful attention to familial narratives and close observation of nature, the body, and the complexities of loss. The collection also probes the significance of legacy, both the legacy the poet inherits as well as the one she forges for future generations.
Story & Bone is predominantly comprised of lyrical poems interwoven with fragments of narration, an approach that allows Leipziger to distill and focus on the essence of experience. In the opening poem, “Sugaring,” which meditates on nascence, she uses metaphor to disclose what is essential about her genesis:
……………i was made of almonds and sugar
……………of giving and receiving
……………coast lines dug deep ………with departure
The poem transitions to her grandmother, who fled Europe and “recreat[ed] home / in a latticework / of marzipan,” and then returns to the speaker who was born during a period of dictatorship, with “the light of the southern cross dissolving into coconut and clove tangled / in the umbilical cord.” The knitting together of family stories, conveyed through metaphor, goes on. The focus shifts to the speaker’s mother before turning to her daughters who were “born of gingerbread / under a coup d’ivorce.” Though many narrative details are eschewed, the most important ideas are clear. Braided together is the history of women from four different generations, united in a world filled by both pain and sweetness. Leipziger’s masterful entwining of the inheritance of despair and joy ripples through the collection. In “Inheritance,” it’s described as the “gift” of grief, which is portrayed as possessing “its own beauty a patina of verdigris.”
Figurative language is a hallmark of Leipziger’s work in this collection. Nature and the trappings of everyday reality provide tangible shape to thoughts about family and change. For instance, sensually-rendered flowers symbolize the ripening body and fecundity. There’s the “[h]oneysuckle poised to open yellow” in “Lemonade,” while in “Daffodil Waves,” there’s the flower’s quick and unexpected maturation:
……………Green grows yellow
……………with swollen seeds.
……………How suddenly they open
……………releasing their egg yolk trumpets
These seeds are so fertile, they’re bursting, exploding their yellow yolks, a metaphor for propagation. In this act of propagation, we find an unmistakable nod to continuance and survival, a flashback to the speaker’s family that multiplies, even in the wake of difficulty.
Leipziger also uses food and cooking as a means to access vital themes. In “How to help a friend mourn,” with its direct address to a “you” that is the poet herself, Leipziger gives directions for baking a cake, an offering for someone who is grieving. She actively engages the senses through the smell of the grated lemons (lemons from the tree the speaker grew in anticipation of moments such as this one), the gathering of the blueberries, the feel of the softened “butter brick,” and the imagining of carrying “the warm cake to your friend’s house / covered with a tea towel.” The emotions that are stirred in this process are palpable. Greater than this, however, is the poem’s underlying message that the tradition of consoling the bereaved creates and cements community at the same time that it honors the life and memory of the deceased.
The body, as the collection’s title makes clear, is prominent in Story & Bone. Appearing in more than half of its poems, it functions as artifact and metaphor and is a vehicle to communicate connection, belonging, and survival. One poem dedicated to a friend undergoing cancer treatment expresses the speaker’s wish to use poetry to radiate her friend’s cells, wounds, and bones. Another poem asks a person to draw a map of their body to show the speaker where that person’s pain resides. The body is also a place where other types of relationships are engendered. In “The body has always been a writing,” Leipziger shares these arresting words:
……………threadiness,
……………umbilical umbra
……………weave into the placenta & threshold
……………that connect me to you.
……………The line
……………from twin to twin
……………born
……………too early
……………from linen
……………and limb.
……………The mother womb that untethered daughters,
……………my sun, my moon.
With its gorgeous music—the hum and slant rhymes in umbra, umbilical, womb, and moon, and the lilting l sounds in line, linen, limb—these lines cast light on the bond between the speaker and her unborn children and also between the speaker’s in utero twins. The bond is spiritual and also corporeal, with the womb as the literal abode of these developing lives. This notion of the body as a home reoccurs throughout the collection. In another poem, the speaker, referring to her mother, utters “I once lived in your body/your blood in my veins.” Unquestionably, the body in Story & Bone is a hearth. Even elsewhere, Leipziger defines home as her bones and the stories and memories that flow into her.
It would be an oversight not to mention Leipziger’s lush lyric poems about intimacy, love, and longing. Story & Bone includes several poems that divulge the pleasure of the lingering hand, the touch of fingertips on bare skin, the curve of two nestled bodies. In “What my body remembers,” the speaker revels in the recalled image of shadows dancing across her and her lover’s naked bodies and her lover’s torso, “bathed in chiaroscuro,” hovered over hers. There are references to a “moaning moon” and of being “filled” with that other person’s incantations. Passion is present and honored.
What is perhaps most intriguing and powerful to me is the way Leipziger renders the body as a sort of canvas that holds evidence and recollections of the past. In the ghazal “Written on Skin,” we see how a kiss, an umbilical cord, a scar, fingerprints, and even the tattooed numbers of Auschwitz prisoners all leave their marks on the body. Despite the fact that these fade, and may even disappear, over time, the truths they tell live on, both in and through others. Urgently, the living body is proof of survival, though the searing image of the umbilical cord wrapped around the speaker’s neck at birth reminds us of how precarious life is.
There’s a delicate dance between sorrow and hope in Leipziger’s work, but ultimately, optimism and a belief in the future prevails. In the closing poem “Altar,” which is written as an abecedarian so that each line begins with the succeeding letter of the alphabet, guidance for living with benevolence is proffered. It counsels:
……………Begin with stillness. Summon
……………Courage. Kavannah.
……………Deliverance.
As “Altar” progresses, it gestures to other qualities: kindness, love, mystery, openness, as well as the act of revealing the past. It instructs—both the reader and the speaker herself—to “[s]acrifice the things that no longer serve you.” It ends with these compelling lines, which encapsulate the essence of this poignant collection:
……………Universe calls to you.
……………Verify, purify.
……………Wake up your ancestors around the table.
……………Yearn for justice and freedom, bring your
……………Zeal. Bring your self, your deep desire to connect
…………………………the past, the possible, time no longer linear.
Deborah Leipziger is an author, poet, and advisor on sustainability. Deborah’s poems have been published in the UK, the US, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Israel, and the Netherlands, in such magazines and journals as Pangyrus, Salamander, Lily Poetry Review, and Revista Cardenal. Her chapbook, Flower Map, was published by Finishing Line Press (2013). Born in Brazil, Deborah is the author of several books on sustainability and human rights issues. Deborah is the co-founder of the New England Jewish Poetry Festival. Her collection, Story & Bone, was published in early 2023 by Lily Poetry Review Books.
Robin Rosen Chang is the author of the full-length collection, The Curator’s Notes (Terrapin Books). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Journal, Plume, Verse Daily, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. She received a 2023 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, an honorable mention for the Spoon River Review’s 2019 Editor’s Prize, and the Oregon Poetry Association’s Fall 2018 Poet’s Choice Award. She has an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
10 January 2024
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