
The Animal is Chemical by Hadara Bar-Nadav Review by Shannon Vare Christine, Interview by Tiffany Troy
The Animal is Chemical by Hadara Bar-Nadav
Review by Shannon Vare Christine
Interview by Tiffany Troy
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: March 15, 2024
ISBN: 978-1961897007
Pages: 120
When it comes to pain, there are a multitude of beliefs, practices, and techniques all aimed at embracing the discomfort or suppressing the distress. Within this push-pull effect, Western medicine and the pharmaceutical industry often steer patients towards the easiest solution possible, conveniently available in pill or tablet form. If people not only erase physical pain, but also the range of emotions endured, how does that affect the very elements that encompass humanity? While seeking relief and respite, will people unwittingly become shells of themselves, incapable of processing experiences and feelings anymore? In The Animal is Chemical, Hadara Bar-Nadav captures this numbing effect, which is becoming all too common, and likewise illustrates the complexities of the healing process.
Bar-Nadav grapples with the concepts of erasure vs. inclusion, and their potential causes and effects in life that can cascade one into the other, depending on what one chooses during challenging moments. Each choice has its own set of unique outcomes, desirable or not, as in “The Singing Pills”:
I smile all day long
and erase the trance of fire
each time it erupts
(delete, delete).
[...]
My chemical sleep
ordered at the drugstore.
My pharmacist, my god,
my automatic refill,
please quell
and quiet me.
How many of us fake our way through the day to day, replying “I’m ok” to the small talk query of “How are you?” When in fact we, much like Bar Nadav, fight a series of daily battles, campaigns waged during a personal war that none of us are guaranteed to win.
The choice becomes whether to engage the fight or flight response, with some tempting and alluring options: “The pills and the pills, / white circular selves,/ the slippery self,/ slipping, unselfing.” The alliteration, assonance, and rhythm here, in “The Ventriloquist,” hearken back to those found in fairy tales, with specific parallels to the Victorian era, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Much like Alice herself, the speaker appears to be lost at times, yet is on a journey of discovery and self-actualization. During the Victorian era, a variety of drugs and tinctures were easily obtained and widely used. Similarly, the surrealist images encountered by Alice, mimic some of those found later on in the same poem: “My mouth cracks / open, unhinged, thrown / by herniated suns / teething on bone.” Instead of this being a creature encountered in wonderland, the speaker herself emphasizes the uncomfortable changes happening within her. Whether she feels like a snake, predator, or perhaps even an unlikely Queen is yet to be seen, as the reader is along for this journey.
This imagery is carried through within the subsequent poem, “The Queen of Collapse.” However, this is not the Queen of Hearts, whom Alice grapples with, but moreover this Queen signifies the speaker’s process of conquering her trauma: “Queen seized by wide white jaws / My subjects all turn cannibal, animal, maul / Their love gigantic, their never-ending need.” This description allows the reader to feel the internal overwhelm of a cycle, which collapses and regenerates, without ever reaching a finite conclusion. The speaker may be the one in charge, but she is being slowly preyed upon by her dependents and ancestors, perhaps unwittingly erasing certain parts of her being.
Sections II and IV of the book contain a sequence of erasure poems that reframe drug pamphlet inserts, which are at once familiar and reimagined here. Bar-Nadav draws on her experience as a medical editor to shed light on the speaker’s encounters with physical and emotional or spiritual afflictions. These skinny, sprawling verses contain apocalyptic-sounding commands and are punctuated with voluminous white spaces:

These white spaces contain the unspoken, internalized worries and reflections of the speaker, but the reader will likewise fill in these spaces with their own interpretations. They also provide time for the weight of the words and images to sink in, while also spotlighting the dangers of these substances consumed by humans. At times, these substances often present side effects equal to or worse than the condition for which they are being prescribed. In “[Come, it is almost time],” Bar-Nadav observes that these circumstances, like us, are impermanent in their life cycles: “last / for a short time. / An hour / live[d] / gently / on / this page.”
Unfortunately, there is also the reminder that generational trauma is almost impossible to erase. Bar-Nadav’s reflections on her family history of Holocaust survival poses philosophical questions to the reader: “There is always a we / in my mouth, huddled / against my teeth. I start / to speak and out pours / smoke with a leathered / bit of tongue.” Here the speaker of “The Ancestors Take the Reins of My Throat” is learning to embody her own life without the suffocating restraints of her ancestors, but they are an ever present collective within her. Additionally, she feels that she is perhaps cursed by her family’s history, at the hands of the Nazis, as in “Black Screen (Kidney Ultrasound)”: “Hanger-on, damaged / like Aunt Teresa / called deaf-n-dumb / during the war,/ with no words / to rename herself…” Despite her own grief and loss, the speaker tries to envision an autonomous path for herself moving forward, so as not to be ruled by the past or death, like her mother’s careful plotting in “Death Party” “to walk her final rooms.”
In the final section, Bar-Nadav melds together the previous lexicons of medical terminology and family history to illuminate the connections between the two, and question whether pain should be revered and welcomed. Is this cycle of suffering a part of the process of living that should be included, and likewise has the power to propel us to survive? Or should we erase the discomfort and become outside observers, like the speaker in “Prayer (with Percocet): “One pill and I can watch my pain / from across the room.” Whether we are successful in our attempts to create distance between ourselves and our past, our dreams and our nightmares, they will continue to creep into and inform our encounters. The puzzle for each of us becomes: How do we strike the careful balance between inclusion and erasure, while remaining true to ourselves?
“Miniature moon who could crush me”:
A Conversation with Hadara Bar-Nadav about The Animal is Chemical
Hadara Bar-Nadav’s The Animal is Chemical opens with the spirit and bodies of the figure of the dybbuk from Jewish folklore and the burning of Jewish individuals to reclaim and transcend the horrors of the Holocaust, of Nazi experimentation on victims in concentration camps, and of the intergenerational and medical trauma of a speaker who disrupts the fine print of pharmakon inserts. “I took the drugs,” Bar-Nadav writes, “marked for sleep,” before delving into the horrific side effects of “miracle drugs.” The irony is not lost in the speaker’s unanswered prayers: “But I believe, if I believe hard enough, if I am a believer on my knees, / praying for ease, oblivion, please.”
Tiffany Troy: How does the opening poem, “Dybbuk” set up the poems that are to follow in The Animal is Chemical? To me, it introduces the reader to the voice of the female speaker and the preoccupation with Jewish folklore and identity, and thinks through what it means to be burnt and rise again, so to speak.
Hadara Bar-Nadav: Thanks for this thoughtful question. The dybbuk is a disembodied spirit that possesses a human host, and a powerful figure in Jewish folklore. Notably, women with mental health issues were said to be possessed by dybbuks, and could be released by prayer. By language!
My poem “Dybbuk” takes on Jewish stereotypes and the historical burning of Jewish bodies during World War II as well as women’s bodies during the Salem witch trials. I hope to reclaim this spirit, these bodies, these women, as a point of strength, defiance, and resistance. I also think of this poem as crossing boundaries–of body and spirit, life and death, time and place. My ancestors are always with me, and they live inside me and inside every page of this book. I welcome in my family, my ghosts.
TT: I can see that reclamation at work in tandem with a welcoming of the ghosts and your family in “Dybbuk” and through the collection. As the co-editor of Writing Poems, can you speak to your writing process for The Animal is Chemical? Was it at all prompt-driven, and do you conceive of the collection as a “project” or something entirely different?
HBN: Thank you for mentioning Writing Poems, a textbook I co-authored with my late colleague Michelle Boisseau. Writing Poems reminds me of poetry as magic, akin to spells–incantatory and ancient. Poetry contains its history. At the same time, teaching from this textbook reminds me to begin again, to be in the mode of wonder and discovery, to forever be a student (which is why I teach, in part), and to push myself and the language forward.
In The Animal Is Chemical, I tried to push hard on language in the series of erasures based on pharmaceutical package inserts. In these poems, I set out to unearth human language in a human tongue inside of this hard wooden language, printed in 8-point font and folded into tiny cubes, then glued to the side of prescription bottles. What is the language that we really need to hear at this very moment of need when we open up a bottle of pills?
I don’t think of the erasures as prompt driven as much as an act of survival. I looked at package inserts from medications that my family had recently consumed, and wanted instead to offer us an authentic language of care. Once I wrote one erasure, I felt compelled to write another and another. In that way, the project took over.
The non-erasure poems in the book that explore intergenerational and medical trauma similarly felt like a project in that once I started, I couldn’t stop. The poems called to me, even though they were difficult to write and, at times, deeply troubling. I remember needing to take breaks from researching Nazi medical experiments for this book. That research stopped my writing altogether as I struggled to process and then imagine how one could possibly make art from this awful history. Somehow, the poems pulled me through.
In the end, it seemed that both of these “projects” could speak to each other via a language of trauma and healing. Creation in the midst of destruction is undeniably its own kind of medicine.
TT: I am interested in what you said about the “authentic language of care,” in large part because I feel your poems definitely call to a time before the drugs and before the pain but through this very explicit process of utilizing the pill bottle inserts. Similarly, in your non-erasure poems, like “Minefield,” or “Mute” for instance, I felt a seething rage behind the refrain of “No.” How did you craft the voice in both the erasure and non-erasure poems? One comes from this very scientific and cold language and other draws from a much wider lexicon, I feel.
HBN: Thank you for noting this! Part of what I was exploring in this book is the collision of poetry and medicine, of the lyric and medical jargon. Could I really find poetry inside a package insert? Could I break open the language, the syntax, and find some other truths there? This “authentic language of care” is aspirational. In “[Trust us]” the ending imagines and hopes for tenderness and gentle caretaking between patient, pharmacist, and doctor. Other erasure poems question if medicine and medical language are even capable of healing our pain, our trauma. I also hope that these erasure poems, which question our ideas about medicine and healing, can in themselves be seen as an act of care, as they encourage readers to pause before simply taking another pill, to think about what kind of care we and our families really need.
In terms of voice, I try to let both the erasure and non-erasure poems discover themselves and their own voices. Writing for me is an act of listening to and for words and then leaning in to discovery. In the non-erasure poems specifically, my ancestors also guide me and help me find the poems. I follow their fractured stories as far as I can, and the language leads me, along with love and imagination.
Without a doubt there is rage in these poems, and grief, trauma, pain, and awe. At times, the poems even struggle for speech. I grew up in a family with many silences, so the struggle for speech is both personal and creative, and embedded in the poems. The struggle for speech is indicative of a speaker trying to make poems out of these silences, this pain and loss, this erasure of generations of my family, which is physical, spiritual, creative, and raw, and made up of multiple voices.
TT: As a poet who pays homage to her family, her ancestry, and the struggle for speech, who are some of the poets or writers that you look to for inspiration? I ask because writing about silences can often feel daunting if not impossible. How do you channel your own voice to give voice (in some ways) to that which cannot be spoken?
HBN: Paul Celan, Lucie Brock-Broido, Claudia Rankine, Peter Gizzi, Emily Dickinson, Audre Lorde, Gertrude Stein. Celan and Dickinson taught me that I don’t need to be afraid of the dead; they can speak through us and guide us. Language is big enough to carry us all. Here is Celan, who has at times carried me:
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes,
language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go
through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand
darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. (Bremen Prize for Literature, 1958)
For many years I hid in my poems from my family history. After my father’s death, I stopped writing altogether. It was reading Emily Dickinson’s poetry and incorporating her lines into my own poems that taught me I could write about death and come out the other side. Writing my book Lullaby (with Exit Sign) helped me realize that I could be open to my ghosts; they could help me write and honor them.
My job as an artist is not to turn away, to write even when it feels impossible, overwhelming, or frightening. This is how to speak what cannot be spoken. To do it anyway, to crawl through and beyond language. I needed to learn that it is OK for poems to shake us, awaken us. They are capacious and elastic enough to hold us.
That being said, the writing of The Animal Is Chemical was hard, hard work. And I definitely needed to take breaks along the way for my own well-being. The erasure poems offered me some distance, an opportunity to play with language and catch my breath, though I often found myself in troubled and troubling spaces within their landscapes, too.
TT: Yes! Poetry being “capacious and elastic enough to hold us” are words to live by, in spite and through what feels “impossible, overwhelming, or frightening.”
I am curious, The Animal is Chemical of course brings to bear your work as a medical editor in your fluency in the lexicon of the source material. Do you feel your professional life outside of “creative writing” has shaped the writing or putting together of the collection, whether by your outlook, your creative process, or otherwise? If yes, how so? I ask because there is of course a tension between pharmakon language and layman pain, but also because the spirit of discovery (and truth seeking) feels very much attune to the work that you’re doing, though perhaps it’s a different kind of truth.
HBN: My work as a medical editor made language strange to me. I remember mulling over the word “present,” meaning to show up, to be here with attention, to give a public talk, a gift, etc. In the medical realm, “present” also refers to symptoms: a list of things that hurt, concern, or disturb us about our health and our bodies. Being a medical editor helped me sit slant to language and try to figure out these new resonances.
Being a medical editor also drove me back to poetry. I made good money and my job was stable, but I felt isolated creatively and longed for an immersive writing community. I spent two years of my life writing and editing documents related to Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and finally said: Enough! I recommitted my life to creative writing, went to graduate school and lived off of some of the money that I had saved as a medical editor, and have been teaching and writing ever since.
My life as a medical editor also suited my interest in interdisciplinary poetics. Poetry is not an island, some self-enclosed system. There are different fields to explore, different lexicons, that can feed the writing of poetry. I regularly teach a graduate class called Creative Inquiry: The Intersection of Poetry and Research, and encourage students to embark on their own creative research projects, from the discography of Miles Davis to the history of red shoes.
My earliest books were largely inspired by visual art and architecture, and my later books considered literature and history. Interdisciplinary-minded writing promises to enlarge our own experiences and speak to a broader readership as well. I can’t tell you how many doctors and pharmacists have excitedly contacted me about my pharmaceutical erasures. That is a point of entry for them, an invitation, but it is also an invitation for anyone who has ever experienced pain, taken medication, or been overwhelmed by medical jargon. I hope the poems provide a way into language and into poetry generally.
TT: In closing, do you have any thoughts you’d like to share with your readers?
HBN: Keep writing and reading widely. This is good medicine.
Hadara Bar-Nadav is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Poetry Foundation fellowship, and other honors. Her newest book The Animal Is Chemical (Four Way Books, 2024), was awarded the Levis Prize in Poetry, selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jericho Brown. Her other books include The New Nudity; Lullaby (with Exit Sign), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Rilke Prize; The Frame Called Ruin, Editor’s Selection for the Green Rose Prize; and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight, awarded the Margie Book Prize. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Fountain and Furnace, awarded the Sunken Garden Prize, and Show Me Yours, awarded the Midwest Poets Series Prize. In addition, she is co-author with Michelle Boisseau of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. Individual poems appear in the American Poetry Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. Hadara is currently Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Shannon Vare Christine is a poet, teacher, and critic living in Bucks County, PA. She is an alumnus of The Community of Writers and Tupelo Press 30/30 Project. Her poems are featured in various anthologies and publications. Additionally, her poetry reviews and literary criticism were published or are forthcoming in The Lit Pub, Cider Press Review, Sage Cigarettes, Compulsive Reader, The Laurel Review, Vagabond City, and Tupelo Quarterly. Archived writing and more can be found at www.shannonvarechristine.com, her periodic newsletter, Poetic Pause, and on Instagram @smvarewrites.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter.
22 January 2025
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