Review: Katharine Rauk’s Basil
It’s easy to see why Black Lawrence Press selected Katharine Rauk’s Basil as a finalist in the Black River Chapbook Competition. For a book of 32 pages, Rauk writes with truly impressive variety and breadth. She experiments with a range of forms, from prose poems to short meditations, and incorporates subjects as varied as the number of spiders one is likely to swallow while sleeping to Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey. These diverse poems fit together in part because of their sonic density, marked by frequent repetition and internal rhyme.
In addition, all of her poems, regardless of length or style, rely on the strength of careful, poignant images. As a reader, I trust that Rauk is steering me towards things of beauty, in part because her poems move between these images with little interruption. Although the poems are filled with confidently surreal happenings, the strangeness itself never becomes the focus of the poem—it remains on the clarity of the image. For example, one memorable poem describes a fever as the feeling of a heron sitting on the speaker’s chest. In another, the speaker opens a window to encounter “a sunlight of bees.”
Some of the most interesting poems come when Rauk is in direct conversation with science and art. Her poems imagine the implications of statistics in fascinating ways—what is the effect of living near a high-voltage power line on my teacups? what happens when you blend folk narrative with a field guide on toads? Several poems respond to queries from Neruda’s Book of Questions in kind, posing additional questions which layer rich images on the original. In the ekphrastic poem “Self-Portrait with Monkey,” Rauk navigates the difficulty of possession in relationships by acknowledging the independence of her husband relative to Kahlo’s monkey. And yet, this scene is tinged with the sadness of this perpetual loss: “That’s why/ my womb keeps/ erasing itself.”
As a feminist reader, I am especially interested in this kind of representation of women in Basil. Rauk’s poems often focus on women’s bodies and relationships, presenting a range of images and power dynamics. Their bodies are often inhabited by the same surrealism as Rauk’s landscapes. For example, beetles eating wood are compared to the haunting “channels inside a woman’s body/ where even music gets lost.” Another woman is preoccupied with perpetually sweeping a field of snow inside her own body in “What She Knows.” These images of bodily impossibility create a sense of mystery around these women, even for the women themselves. Read more
Review: The Requited Distance by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
In The Requited Distance, Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s interpretation of the Icarus myth is not just a revisiting, but a re-inhabiting and a realigning. She has carefully crafted an expanded spectrum on which to plot the story, not only in terms of time, but in a layering of voices which gradually correlate into as close of an explanation as one might present for tragedy. By tracing the path of the father and son from Daedalus’ development as an inventor to a navigation of the afterlife, Griffiths allows the inclusion of their voices and others as harrowing warnings, frames which provide alternative clarities of the events which led to Icarus’ death.
It is here, in this careful attention to character, that the reader begins to collect options and interpretations for grief. Griffiths employs the voices of every conceivable witness to the myth, from a dead nephew to the sea and a fig tree. These speakers express themselves through song, written word, and oral narration. They speak alive and dead, at the gates of heaven and as an eagle over the American desert. His own words reveal the perspective of Daedalus as obsessive in its mechanical outlook and mathematization of all problems, jarringly juxtaposed with Icarus’ world of dream and memory. Thus, we anticipate a collision when this man, who perceives people as skeletal ribcages and treats religion as a proof, encounters a son enchanted by flight.
This disjuncture is further complicated by questions of parenthood and faith. In Griffiths’s world, it is as rational for Greek men to consult James Brown for advice as an oracle; blues singers and artists are sources of definite wisdom. Icarus looks to these sources while his father’s faith in his own inventions reflects a self-glorification, a total confidence in himself as a savior. In this way, the text directly engages with the structure of a Christian trinity; Icarus states, “I am not like Christ,” while working to dismantle the conflation of father and god, as well as father and son. This makes Icarus’ longing for a present father even more poignant – he seeks one in death, a liminal place in which love is possible. Read more
Review: Wait by Alison Stine
It was a joy to rediscover the work of Alison Stine – her first book of poems, Ohio Violence, fascinated me with its depiction of a Midwestern landscape that many book reviewers have termed “gothic”. Stine’s second book, Wait (U. Wisconsin, 2011), returns to this same territory, but with a different sense of purpose. In these poems, which chronicle the year before a woman’s marriage, we witness a transformation in the narrator’s understanding of the dynamics of gender in the particular setting of the Midwest.
In Stine’s work, the relationship between humans and the natural world is a powerful source of instability. In many instances, the land is an embodied victim of machinery; ponds fear to make a sound in the face of people forever plowing and hunting. The precision of her agricultural descriptions takes these connections beyond a simple predator/prey relationship, however. For example, farmers bury live asparagus stalks to keep them white and pristine. Yet, the natural world creates its own disturbances, as water “slices from the sky” and birds peel bark from the trees. Homes appear fragile against these forces.
The persistence of this instability allows Stine to begin drawing gendered connections across the landscape. In the hands of men, tools inflict pain and create vulnerability, whether through farming equipment scarring the land or a photographer blurring the faces of women in his images. In one vivid example, priests crush the mouth of a statue of the goddess Nefirtiti to prevent her from sharing information. Women are often configured as prey or the constant subject of the male gaze. Women’s bodies fill dresses rather than possessing innate form, and even their own actions preserve their vulnerability, like the bareness of shaving their legs or the exposure of a pregnancy test. Stine draws us to reflect on not only the use of force against women and nature, but also the silencing effects of these actions. Read more
Take Our Daughters (and Sons) to Work Day
This past Thursday, April 28th, was the 19th anniversary of Take Our Daughters to Work Day! When I was a kid, my dad worked in a lab that had a pretty strict “no kids” policy, so one year he brought his work to my classroom. As far as I recall, this involved making some sort of a tornado in a blender, but we thought it was awesome. Also, he worked as a chemist on formulating laxatives, so if you can convince a bunch of kids that that is interesting, I suspect you can convince them of anything.
My two younger sisters lucked out, though, because he later moved to a company that sponsored a big old party for Take Our Daughters to Work – they got to walk around in lab coats and safety goggles, and were allowed to “make their own” lip balm with the help of some friendly lab techs. This company, like many, actually titled their celebration “Take Our Children to Work Day,” and the celebrants included children of all genders. Read more
Injustice at Every Turn
41% of respondents to a survey reported having attempted suicide (vs. 1.6% of the general population).
Of this same group, respondents were 4 times more likely than the general population to live in extreme poverty, defined as earning less than $10,000 per year.
The thing these people have in common? They are transgender Americans. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force recently released a study on discrimination against transgender or gender non-conforming people, using data collected from 6,450 participants. Today, a new video on its results co-produced by the PBS show In the Life appears on Feministing. Read more
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