Healing and Hope: A Trio Review of Recent Poetry Books to Challenge How We Heal
I have a confession: I have a fear of most large, open-bodied water sources.
A relatively consistent nightmare I have places me—a younger version of myself—on the shore of a raging sea, and out at sea, one by one, I see the people I love bobbing, gasping for breath. Even though I am a young child (no older than ten), I make the effort to try and save the people I love. But when I look back at shore, they are standing there safely, trying to make sure I get safe, and they are upset I put myself in such a position. I dare say they are angry. The nightmare rotates these scenes a bit more until my stomach is unsettled and my likelihood to return to sleep is minimal. With sluggish breath, I try and block the anxiety from this dream, but, consistently, I feel unable to relax enough to fall back asleep.
The nightmare, no doubt, is a result of childhood trauma I suffered; in fact, I’ve spent most of my adult life writing about it—it being trauma and the ramifications it has had—and working on it through counseling and productive conversations. As if the trauma itself wasn’t enough, my life path has been altered.
Some core things about me remain: I still love Batman, the thrill of opening a pack of baseball cards, and Jackson Browne will always be a musician I listen to, but large crowds, the intimacy of trusting another person completely, and water make me nervous. This leads to feeling unsettled, which in turn, leads to feeling fractured.
***
When I began writing the detail of this nightmare my brain flashed a line I read from Annamae Sax, a writer who served as blogger-in-residence for the Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Award poetry blog. Sax writes: “…poetry for many is a lifeline. A thread that can reconnect us back to ourselves, our experiences, our bodies and can make them our own again.”
The idea of reconnection to one’s self flashed another, opposing idea—a line from the song “The Infidel” by the Republic Tigers: “Am I an infidel? / Because I don’t believe my calluses are ever gonna leave.” With writerly curiosity, I looked up the word infidel and found that its origin comes from Latin; “fides” means faith, and the word is linked to “fidere,” which means to trust. As I performed this deep dive into language, I had to take a moment to catch my breath because I felt my heart racing, the way my heart races when I feel like I’m venturing too close to an unstable water source.
During these challenging times, I’ve noticed my writing has been more concerned with fear and faith. The more I explore fear though, the more I try to be mindful of individuals who restore faith inside of me. This mindfulness allows for deeper introspection, but also shows me the line of too-far-gone. As a friend of mine once said to me in childhood, if you dig long enough, all you’ll find is dirt. It’s been a guiding lesson most my life.
To that end, I think of a letter I got from a friend of mine last year on my wedding day. It reads in part: “I’ve never known anyone to find healing and hope in text the way you do…My wish is that you never lose that impulse.”
Healing and Hope.
As I move toward the review, I will try to keep those words with me as torches in the dark spots of my brain. Today’s review is a writerly challenge to myself: a triple-review. It wasn’t something I expected to come to fruition for some time, but somehow a triad of books I’ve read (and re-read) recently all kind of lined up in a magical way: Bridget Lowe’s My Second Work (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020), Jenny Molberg’s Refusual (Louisiana State University Press, 2020), and Chelsea Dingman’s Through a Small Ghost (University of Georgia Press, 2020).
Some of the connective threads to share right of the bat: all three books are second full-length collections, and university presses will forever have a soft spot in my soul. Additionally, all three resonate with themes of healing and hope. But going deeper, I noticed the way each book focuses time and attention toward trauma—rooted in feelings of fracture and separation—but with each book comes a distinctive approach.
***
There were no visible
wounds. Still, something bled
and I couldn’t tend to it.
There was no fence, there was
no leash.
Bridget Lowe, from “The Unicorn in Captivity”
There are many moments in Bridget Lowe’s My Second Work where I found myself audibly gasping. The book is written in three sections, and one of the early instances of gasping was the choice of the section break symbol: an infinity sign. The infinity sign is a subtle showcase of the permanence of things, and the looped nature of the symbol makes me think of the Greek omega, and omega makes me think of power. Bridget Lowe’s second book is an investigation of faith, trust, and power. And through these poems, something stunning happens: the speaker (and the poet) push on. What results are poems James Longenbach calls “…brilliant, scary, and heartbreakingly alive.”
***
I came to know Bridget Lowe’s work courtesy of her New Yorker poem “The Understudy”—a short poem of fifteen lines, spaced across five tercets—and, going back to the idea breath-taking, my heart raced and a case where my breath shortened occurred when I got to these lines:
I let go of the handlebars and beat
my chest with shame’s gorilla fist
until the trees get in my way.
Nancy Drew before me, Nancy Drew
behind me, Nancy Drew on all
sides of me, Lord hear my prayer.
My Second Work by Bridget Lowe. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020. 72 pages. $15.95.
The lines resonated with me, and forced me to consider the animalistic nature of shame paired with the inescapability of deep woods. Also, how striking to use Nancy Drew, a fictional hero and protector. This fusion of imagery and mythos served as lure and, when it comes to Bridget Lowe’s poems, I was hooked.
The poem I used as an epigraph to this section of the review, “The Unicorn in Captivity,” speaks to, as Lowe indicates in her book notes, “…the medieval Flemish series known as the Unicorn Tapestries.” Continuing further, she writes “[T]his poem is for those who have stayed in relationships of abuse, either longer than they thought they should, or even permanently, much to their own bewilderment and shame.” To that point, I revisit where I stopped, and the poem reads “…Still, I stood at the edge / of something, looking out.”
“The Unicorn in Captivity” is one of those poems that every time I read it, I can feel a palpable buzz through my being. The poem sets the scene for the speaker’s emotional landscape, and in my eyes, serves as the heart of the book. It’s worth noting the unicorn appears again near the close of the second section in another powerful poem titled “The Unicorn Defends Itself.”
The last poem I’d like to address is the first poem of the third section: “In A Suburb” (I should warn you reading; there is reference to injuring a dog in the poem). A quick glance over the poem reveals there are three distinctive characteristics: 1) The poem is noticeably longer than any other poem housed in the book, 2) there is lacking punctuation, and 3) it requires the reader to open the book horizontally. While in a conversation with Lowe, she mentioned it made the longer lines easier to read, and helped to avoid unnecessary line breaks, but I also can’t help but think reading horizontally serves as immersion into the speaker’s world with subtle and powerful nuance. This experience of reading is made is more powerful still when you consider the lack of punctuation, the untamed nature of it all. The poem opens:
And then the trees gave up too
So it was final
A kind of agreement of the status of things
Once again, Lowe begins a poem with a contract of sorts to indicate power structure. The poem continues with a rabbit and a speaker who “…was jealous, [I] was jealous of every animal I met.”
Going forward, the next full page of the poem opens with one of my favorite lines in the book: “And I everywhere at once / Tom Thumb-like in capability of shrink.” The Tom Thumb reference, much like Nancy Drew mentioned before, showcases mythic characters, but this reference is a little more haunting; Tom Thumb, or Charles Sherwood Stratton, was one of the favorite attractions of P.T. Barnum, and his dwarfism was used to drive ticket sales. This poem’s speaker is cautiously aware of power structures, especially concerning nature’s influence, as indicated by the rabbit that darts through the beginning of the poem and the dead grackle who takes up most of the second page of the poem. Shortly after the dead grackle imagery, a family appears:
My mother inside redecorated our living room a hundred times
Changed the placement of a lamp just so
While my brother built a cell in the basement
With a mattress on the floor and walls of bedsheets
Tied to the beams in the ceiling
And a record player, The Lemonheads and The Wall
On repeat and I was a saint I was capable of everything at once
They patted my head thank god thank god
Our bizarro version of heaven
Deductive reasoning from this section could showcase three things: 1) a mother figure concerned with the way things look, rather than how they are, 2) another indication of power struggle and contracts as the brother built a cell, and 3) the musical references, “The Lemonheads and The Wall” offer a slight way in. It’s striking to me that The Lemonheads are referenced only by name, while The Wall, a major studio album of Pink Floyd, gets specific reference. But that’s one of the things I love about Bridget Lowe’s poems; they require multiple readings to appreciate the layers presented. A Bridget Lowe poem may not give you a single, textbook “answer,” but it will make you more consciously aware of what sort of questions you are expecting from poems, and more specifically, poets. Lowe’s poems consistently challenge the notion of the personal, which I find stunning, time and time again.
That being said, “In A Suburb” continues right after the “bizarro version of heaven” line:
Almost complete we loved you we hated you the way you made us laugh
Abundance the answer to every particular lack
The dog got kicked for jumping the fence the hundredth time
Everything bad happened again and again
We had to teach her a lesson he said
Then tears of joy the dog came back
The calculated use of “you” and “he” indicates a speaker’s separation from said individual, but isn’t it interesting to see the use of “we” used in his line; I find it so powerfully revealing. The calculated usage of pronouns, again, serves as evidence that Lowe is deliberate with the what provided in her poems—it’s wielded impressively time and time again in this collection. The poem ends with a striking image, a recreation of a family photograph, and Bridget Lowe takes my breath away, once again.
I believe Bridget Lowe’s poems are a gift and, with each reading, light unravels itself from the nightmarish landscapes. And that, in itself, is a gift. Before quarantine life made Zoom readings a regular occurrence I had the good fortune to see Lowe read her poems live. What an act of courageousness and faith. One such poet Lowe read with was fellow based-in-Missouri poet Jenny Molberg whose second collection Refusal is a testament to the power of friendship and recovery, as means for overcoming trauma and abuse.
***
Jenny Molberg’s first book Marvels of the Invisible was the recipient of the Berkshire Prize from Tupelo Press and was published in 2017. Molberg currently teaches at University of Central Missouri, where she serves as the director of Pleiades Press, and edits Pleiades: Literature in Context. Molberg’s sophomore collection Refusual (Louisiana State University Press, 2020) is rich with mythology and pop culture references. Specific references to Ophelia and Demogorgons are littered throughout the book. Similar to Bridget Lowe’s collection, Molberg divides her work into multiple sections, which also house epistles, which as David Keplinger says, are “…sent off from the narrow beds that stand between obsession and freedom, trauma and resilience, memory and letting go.” The poems explore familial relationships, abusive relationships, and addictive relationships, but as David Keplinger mentions, resilience exists too.
I read Jenny Molberg’s first poem, “Note,” originally in Ploughshares, and was immediately hooked into the collection. Consider the beginning:
He said he would hang himself
so as to not make a mess.
But he was still there the next day.
And the next. And the next.
He wrote the note for the cops
on a page he tore from my favorite book
of poems. That’s all I saw of it—
in absence—the ripped-out page
like a jagged fin down the spine.
The first couplet alone is a dagger, but the persistence of his influence, and the ripped page astounding, relentless. It doesn’t stop, it continues:
I did not feel secure,
though I married the only man
I believed I was safe. Two children.
Three dogs. The dying cat.
Papers signed and unsigned.
The woman who pasted her face
over mine in our photos
and mailed them as proof of their affair
before she tried to kill herself
This, too, he does not tell me.
Reading the words again, I cannot help but feel like they insurmountable ocean waves, the speaker is left immersed in the ocean of grief and harm, and cannot get out. It’s a devastating opening of a poem, but serves strikingly as a compass out of the hurt, the harm, the ocean.
Refusal by Jenny Molberg. Louisiana State University Press, 2020. 86 pages. $18.95.
The second poem of the book serves as the first of Molberg’s epistles and is titled “Epistle from the Hospital for Cheaters.” Rather than focusing on the content, I just want to mention the power and the strength of the speaker in contrast to “Note.” The ferocity of that voice is in stark contrast and it merited attention. There are five more epistles in the first section, which all lead up to the poem that closes the first section: “The Night I Left.”
The second section of Jenny Molberg’s Refusal may contain the fewest number of poems, but it also houses the book’s longest poem: “The Spirit Change.” The poem is broken down into nine distinct sections which begin with varying subheaders, as outlined in Molberg’s notes, from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (Alcoholics Anonymous, first published 1953). Coming one after another, the sections hold incredible weight, especially the close of the first section:
…Mom’s bags full of storm chimes.
I wanted to touch the ghost of her face,
but the face was under water now,
eyes like buoys bobbing on meniscus,
eyes like the eyes in the water below.
The epigraph? Not a soul must ever know.
The powerful water I imagined earlier is here and raging and it’s dizzying. I feel so intensely for the speaker of this poem. But it doesn’t stop, take this part of the third section:
…when she pulled over on a thin strip of shoulder
and the white minivan became a submarine.
She couldn’t breathe and I felt
all the pressure of being her child.
…
… A man in a tan Toyota
pulled over, I don’t know what they said
to each other, but then he was driving
us home.
I think what strikes me most about this part of the poem, as well as the poem, and Molberg’s collection at length, is how the power and influence of other individuals plays such a prominent part in the poems. But perhaps the most striking? Molberg is still writing the poems and using her power to shape and mold her narrative of strength and power. It amazes me.
Jenny Molberg’s poems continuously amaze me.
Other sections of brilliance from this poem include the moments with the following subheaders:
It was only by repeated humiliations that we were forced to learn something about humility.
We want to rest on our laurels.
We must recognize now is that we exult in some of our defects. We really love them.
I believe this poem embodies Jenny Molberg’s book because it is an unwavering look into how an outside force (alcoholism) can lead to deep-rooted feelings of shame and disappointment, but through narrative and structure, something magical can happen: healing and recognition. Take these last lines of the final section:
…Mom was getting her five year chip.
When she stood up
I saw her.
It was not her
and the most her
I’d ever seen.
All the faces moved
in a collective gesture
of recognition, not pity,
under her face that lit
like a moon the carpeted room.
Once again, my breath successfully taken to the point of my own water swelling—as I write this, tears flow down my cheeks, and I am moved. I am moved to a place where healing and hope can, and does, happen. And that place is I consistently felt when reading Jenny Molberg’s poems.
A safe place.
I will hold onto that for a long time.
***
As I move to the final poet, Chelsea Dingman, I think of these lines from Judith Guest’s classic novel-turned-to-film Ordinary People: “And what about tomorrow then? And all the tomorrows to come? Why can’t we talk about it? Why can’t we ever talk about it?” In this instance, it refers to grief, and the line comes to mind because I encourage you, reader, to continue to find a way through, and maybe that way through, is talking. Maybe it’s writing. Maybe both. Maybe neither at this point in time. But I hope that you continue to find your way through, and I hope you find your way through healthily and it brings you true restoration.
***
Chelsea Dingman is a poet I’ve known for just over three years now; her debut Thaw made its way into my hands by way of being selected by the ever-wonderful Allison Joseph as part of the National Poetry Series. She also has a lovely chapbook from the good people over at Madhouse Press titled What Bodies Have I Moved which I reviewed over at Glass: A Journal of Poetry. Her latest, Through a Small Ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize, and as noted by contest-judge Travis Denton, “…gives voice to the unspeakable—the fact of a stillborn child.” In light of that immense grief, Dingman’s poems track how families and relationships change and evolve, and the poems that follow are often full of hurting, but also, healing. As Dingman writes in “When A Mother Is Not The Wind But The Window”: “Let us learn the sea, presiding over craggy rock. Let us/learn the tragedy of winter days that light won’t touch.”
Through a Small Ghost by Chelsea Dingman. University of Georgia Press, 2020. 120 pages. $19.95.
The first poem I’d like to consider is “Instructions For Resurrection [Of Our Marriage If Nothing Else],” the poem opens:
Don’t tell me about the dead
leaves littering the gutters, your fists
& jaw clenched at the impossibility
of order.
I found this opening similar to Bridget Lowe’s “In A Suburb” in the sense that a familial figure is concerning oneself with appearances, and “…the impossibility / of order.” And again, nature’s influence makes itself present, as the poem continues:
…Don’t tell me a name
can be buried in the skin
when the sky is suffering
again.
The poem continues forth with four more “don’t” statements to combat the five “tell” statements that begin roughly halfway down the poem, a poetic decision I found particularly interesting. The sparring statements felt like Velcro in the sense that there was give and take, but with damage, cohesion is difficult. This is evident as the poem closes:
…Tell me
talk of trees is the real crime
when I can’t talk of the missing
child. That blame is the sparrow
that thrusts itself against my ribs
until it crushes its own skull.
Even the use of language here aids in the harshness of the speaker’s voice, with words like talk, blame, thrusts, crushes—the mouthfeel of the language is rough, drawn-out, and distressing. This, on top of the powerful emptiness of nature, makes this poem chilling and enduring in my heart and mind.
Another poem that speaks to Dingman’s ability to direct varying experiences through calculated nuances is “Revisions”; the poem’s staying power stems from the content, yes, but paired with it, are an abundance of ampersands and overt lack of periods, until the ending. The use of punctuation indicates calculated breaths, the pervasiveness of and showcases the continuation of hurt. Speaking of the poem more exactly now, Dingman writes another extraordinary opening:
sometimes you don’t die
but bloom back like the soil long dead
under snow & you are born to this stain of sun
creeping under the blinds of the body I inherited
from the ghosts of mothers, inhabited
by ghosts of long grasses…
A characteristic I’ve long admired from Chelsea Dingman’s poems is the entangled layering of image and narrative—one thing building on another, on another—and creating work of such density they are bound to stay with me. And, I assure you, they will stay with you, dear reader.
Speaking of the book as a whole, I found myself reflectively considering the usage of white space and caesuras time and time again. Poems like “Ephemera,” “Redaction,” and “Re-Petition” are places where this wielding of poetic direction really shines.
Though there are many more poems I could discuss, the poem I’d like to close with is “All Things Conspire To Keep Silent About Us,” which is near the end of the book, but really breaks open a new line of vision that I feel compelled to talk about. Once again, a dagger of an opening, as Dingman writes:
We won’t get to choose which night ends
in fanfare. Which night ends in a hammer
to the living room walls. I want to say
I’m not afraid of loud noises after years
of being awoken in the middle of the night
sure that someone was dying.
The subtle rhymes of choose and room paired with say and afraid have a powerful lulling effect that truly allows the narrative of this poem to sing. I also want to morph Dingman’s line-breaking ability into my own craft, the duality of the stand-alone lines only serves to heighten the power of each line following each other. I am once again dumbfounded by the power of Dingman’s lines; they are absolutely incredible. The poem continues:
. . . I want my hands
not to shake with violence. I’ve had the same dream
most of my life: I am stuck in a blizzard
with my little brother, calling & calling our dead
father for help.
Similar to the nightmare I suffer from I mentioned earlier, an analysis of the speaker’s nightmare with blizzards could mean the speaker struggling through an obstacle is taking all their energy, and the weight of the snow could prove overwhelming. Reading this book, it is clear to see that obstacle that is taking all the speaker’s energy is grief. But, similar to the speakers present in Bridget Lowe and Jenny Molberg’s poetry, the speaker pushes forth, and not in the Hollywood version of everything turning out perfectly, but rather through this line:
“Sometimes, I know how to be loved.”
That line.
I keep returning to it.
And I cannot let it go.
The poem continues:
… More
often, I wake to a filthy sky, food on the floor,
my son crying for someone else. I wake to a world
that has never loved anyone well. To planes & bombs
& buildings reimagined in the nostalgia of hindset.
Winter doesn’t touch me anymore.
Reading this poem as a stand-alone piece for the book, you might be convinced the speaker is jaded and dismissive, but I think the speaker is pulsingly aware of their surroundings, but continues.
That strength is the key to this book.
That key is what opens up Chelsea Dingman’s poems time and time again.
And the healing happens. The after happens.
The capacity for love and gentleness, cleanliness and dirtiness exists.
And what amazingness it is.
***
I don’t always know what paths and directions my life will take, but I know that when I need a roadmap I consistently turn to poetry.
It grounds me.
It restores me.
It pushes me forward. It allows me voice to past hurt.
It provides healing.
It is healing.