The Fault by Marcela Sulak Review by Brandel France de Bravo

The Fault by Marcela Sulak

Review by Brandel France de Bravo

Black Lawrence Press

July 2024

ISBN: 978-1-62557-076-5

Pages: 90

Marcela Sulak’s The Fault invites us into a doubled world: the very real and relatable one of a failed romantic relationship, and a looking-glass realm where down comforters contain nightmares and houses brush their teeth. As in Alice in Wonderland, these parallel worlds are interlaced and illuminate each other. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, the speaker finds herself falling “…past the desert bowls and / the buttered knives past the lines of ants across the balcony” (“And the Violins”). Unlike Alice, the speaker’s descent occurs at the end of her journey.

 Even the book’s title is two-sided. Flip the fault-coin and it lands on blame or dividing line. In The Fault, two people—“F” and “M”—merge their lives and children under one roof, marry, and finally go their separate ways. In the titular poem, the wife feels a fault nipping at her ankle. She bends down to pick it up from the path covered in dry grass and asks, “Whose fault are you, little one”? The wife carries the lost fault around all day, at work and on errands, wondering why no one is looking for it. When she meets up with the husband who she suspects of having dropped the fault on the way to market, he says, “This isn’t my fault. I’m afraid it’s yours.”

Written in lineated poems, prose poems, and flash essays, The Fault is like a dark and witty novella with echoes of fairy tales. Think Beauty and the Beast without the tame ending. In Sulak’s version, Beauty is the animal, compared in several poems to vermin (rat, roach, vole or mole), while the Beast is cold and rational as an engineer. When the female brings two twigs to the nest, he tosses them out, crying “structural integrity evaluation” (“The Twigs”).

The relationship’s demise is foreshadowed in the opening poem “Seed Bank,” where love is compared to a pollinating fly, “… it is so flighty a thing,” and “To love is to discern which fields/will become habitual…” It isn’t long before the reader discovers that some fields habitually yield conflict, the book’s central theme. From the speaker’s perspective, conflict stems from being misunderstood (“The Neanderthals could talk/of course they could, but they just couldn’t express their needs/in a way that Homo sapiens could accept.”) and from F’s regular and blithe transgression of boundaries. Boundaries are a recurring motif, including in “The Boundaries,” (where the boundaries need to be bathed and have their fur dried!), “Sugar Fence Moon,” “Rampart, ” and “F Takes a Fence.” Paradoxically, it’s F’s inability to perceive the partners’ separateness that leads to the couple’s separation. 

Of course, The Fault is “about” much more than the dissolution of a relationship, the incompatibility of a Neanderthal and a Homo Sapiens (“Tooth”).  Gardening and composting—another form of dissolution—figure prominently throughout.   

           I’m wondering what a decomposing human body looks like
           at three months. It’s odd
           how there are no books for that, no What to expect when You’ve
           Stopped Expecting. What
           is the inverse of your baby is now the size of a grapefruit?
           I am this decomposition,
           and at the same time, alive on the earth above. 
							                                            (“Double Life”)

The third poem “Double Life” quoted above—one of my favorites—reveals that the speaker nearly lost her life in an accident where she was “crushed on the roadside like an animal.” It’s also in this poem that readers first meet “F,” the speaker’s husband. “And F’s boyish body stabbing into mine/and holding my hand after,/and holding my arms in a shroud-like embrace until I always wake/and move somewhere else.” 

Our first encounter with F is emblematic of the meta-conflict in The Fault, between the potential death of self when merging with another, dissolving into another, and the desire to escape and be free. The speaker confesses at the end of “Double Life” that she’s not sure how this tension will resolve itself: 

           and even then no one lets me rest in peace, for he comes looking
           for me to ask what is it?
           and it wakes me again every time, and I don’t have an answer
           for what it is I am now.

This poem, and the book as a whole, is soil rich with the fertile remains of Keats’ negative capability. In contrast to the persona of F, there’s no reaching after fact and reason in The Fault where something sharp can both save and sink you. When the speaker is near death and feels herself “reaching for what comes next,” she thinks of her young daughter, “the nail on which the soul catches when reaching out.” The daughter’s image pulls the speaker from the brink, anchoring her to this life. In the book’s penultimate poem “Storyboard,” the speaker lists a few of the roles she’s been assigned in the household (bad witch, evil stepmother, siren) and voices her desire “to escape into the double space between each full stop…or the single spaces between words.” But what’s been holding her back is the very font she’s chosen: “I should have been using sans serif here…” The serifs are always catching her and pulling her back, puncturing her dreams of liberation. 

Allusions to the act of writing—of thinking and telling one’s story—thread through The Fault. In another one of my favorite poems, “Show Your Work,” the speaker relates a sequence of seemingly unrelated anecdotes that culminate in a kind of artistic statement. In her commitment to showing her work, the speaker even includes the words and names of authors she looked up because she wasn’t sure she’d spelled them correctly in the poem: badminton, Maleficent, Boullosa, and Ruefle. Notice how the book titles in the following quote seem to subtly comment on the speaker’s situation: “Were I to show you my work just now, for example, I’d tell you I’d just finished Carmen Boullosa’s novella Before and had begun Mary Ruefle’s My Private Property, which I read with my brain still in Before.” 

And isn’t this how we all, artists or not, read and live? With “half a brain in the last story,” the last conversation, the last fight, the last lover? I don’t fault Sulak for occupying my brain for days, weeks after reading her. On the contrary, I’m grateful. Once her singular voice starts to decompose, I’m certain it’s going to fertilize my own poems. 

Marcela Sulak is the author of five poetry collections, most recently, The Fault, the National Jewish Book Awards finalist, City of Sky Papers, and the lyric memoir Mouth Full of Seeds (2020). She’s co-edited  Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. Her translations have been recognized by PEN and the NEA. Sulak edits The Ilanot Review, and directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University.

Brandel France de Bravo is a poet (Provenance and Mother, Loose) and essayist. Her third book of poems, Locomotive Cathedral, was selected in the Backwaters Press Contest for publication by University of Nebraska Press in March 2025. Her poems and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry, 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Conduit, The Georgia Review, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere.

11 June 2025