Shame Will Not Have the Last Word: A Review of Jessica Fischoff's The Desperate Measure of Undoing

Recently, Senator Elizabeth Warren talked about losing her job as a teacher in 1971 when she became “visibly pregnant,” and a host of critics came out to call her a liar. That couldn’t be possible, they argued. Yet of course it was. The senator went on to say that such things still happen to women today, even though they aren’t specifically sanctioned by law. I’ve had several men tell me this past year that there is no pay gap in this country between women and men, even though all evidence and experience proves otherwise. Jessica Fischoff’s new book of poetry The Desperate Measure of Undoing is in large part a reaction to and reminder of these kinds of discrimination, and a message to those who refuse to admit, let alone work to fix, these ongoing misogynistic realities. Her book echoes the ways these issues repeat throughout history, even as many men refuse to notice or acknowledge them.

The book begins with the poem “The Fortune Teller.” The first lines read, “Give me your hand, I promise to be / gentle,” and offers hope to the reader later in the poem with “There is light /beyond the threshold, significant and pervading.” The tone of “we will overcome” is set. And yet the poem ends with “Nothing hurts that isn’t real,” cementing women’s realities in a world of patriarchal doubt, and setting up the inevitable contradiction that all is possible/all is limited.

The Desperate Measure of Undoing continues with hints of delicate power that insist on apologizing for themselves. The power of love, often seen as weakness, is portrayed here as uniquely feminine, and uniquely inadequate. Our world believes that love by itself is not enough to solve problems when really, it’s the solution to every dilemma we face. Love repudiates war, pain, dominance, all things that reinforce hierarchies meant to justify oppression. In “Abduction” Fischoff writes, “Body, forgive me this much love,” a cry of regret rooted in shame. In “The Museum” the author finds

…the picture
you painted for me of letters stacked so high

that the L bent beneath the weight of the O
and the V flattened where it fell against the E.
But love is not a word you need to read

from top to bottom
left to right
or out loud

In fact, the word “heart,” the universal symbol for love, is peppered throughout the collection, beating strongly as the most necessary and fundamental pulse of humanity.

Eve also figures heavily in this book, the O.G. of sin, the archetypal woman who, in the telling by the patriarchy, is the root of every problem in the world. Born in perfection and branded by transgression, she’s responsible for all pain we are now plagued by, and all women are her: worthy of blame; flawed; burdened; responsible. This myth is the genesis of our inevitable female self-conscious concern of never enough. If we are responsible for original sin, how can we ever be forgiven? How can we not long to go back to the beginning for a do-over? The poem “I’ve Been Spreading My Legs Like a Wishbone” tries to do this by re-entering the womb, unwinding time before sinful mistakes: “a thing can be opened without unhinging, / free me from this sentence / of splintering, weave me back into the rib.” The narrator yearns for re-absorption and absolution. A plea to the powers-that-be to allow us to shed this skin of wickedness.

Coupled with this inherent shame is righteous anger. “My Body is a Library” insists that “If all it takes to lose myself is burning the history that /brought me here, then hand me the match.” Fischoff will not allow shame to have the last word. If necessary, we’ll burn everything to the ground to gain agency, to claim power. To name the world properly.

The poem “Oh” begins,

Eve,

How often do you think of me?
The house now, the kids, and
Everyone needs to eat, I know how tired
You are to mother the world

Forgive me your skin

These stanzas serve as an apology to Eve for what we’ve done to her, for what we’ve done to ourselves. For taking on every job, every responsibility. If Eve is “mother[ing] the world,” then men are benefitting from her emotional and physical labor while using it as a means of subjugation. What of this could possibly require an apology? And yet we apologize, over and over again. For bumping into a stranger around a corner. For taking up too much space in line. For inconveniencing those who seek to profit from our pain. For everything. And if we apologize for everything, then apologies lose their meaning, their potency. Surely, we can’t be responsible for everything. And if we are, then ultimately, we are responsible for nothing.

So how does this resolve? How do we live in the contradiction? The poem “The Hold” looks for answers, claiming that “For years I felt my body suffer the ache of restitution.” Does this restitution ever come? Can it? This hint from the author, among others, suggests that societal structures must be reimagined for healing to happen, for healing to even be a possibility. The existing structures were created by men, benefit men, and are propped up by men. How can these networks built to exclude us do the hard work of inclusion without fundamental change? Fischoff maintains that they can’t. We must reinvent our institutions. People of all genders, races, backgrounds, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and ages must have their say in the creation of a new world. Until then, we have nothing to apologize for.