Grief and Gravity: A Review of ANCHOR by Rebecca Aronson

“A body” writes Rebecca Aronson in her new collection, Anchor, “is a just a set of nerves in fur and spangles.” Yet these nerves at the core of our simple being can turn our lives into a labyrinth of emotion. A brief, breathtaking journey through the viewpoint of an adult child who must navigate her own parents’ decline and passing, Anchor deftly sidesteps the maudlin or macabre and invites us into a new reckoning with mortality.

Death waits just beyond the next page in this collection. The imminence of mortality, almost more than mortality itself, troubles the speaker. In a series of letter poems addressed “Dear gravity,” she cajoles the broader forces in the world—specifically, those that knock her father off his literal and metaphorical balance—for understanding of why they must do what they do. Such knowledge can’t empower us but is learning for knowing; as the speaker laments, “how vexing to be made an instrument/that measures only what can’t be mastered.” The lack of control and its associated pain cut deep in these poems, even as the narrative tension keeps us reading.

Aronson captures the absurd heartbreak of dementia with particular accuracy. One day, the devastation is palpable, and, as in “Source,” the speaker laments of her mother, “she has forgotten everything/she ever wondered.” Yet as many loved ones of dementia patients know, there are also moments of levity, as in “My Mother at the Gate”: “Sometimes/kindness descends like a fever. We walk the halls/laughing at nonsense and are briefly cheerful.” We cling to what we can, and we shake off or sit with what we wish to forget.

At once expansive and microcosmic, Anchor scrutinizes all levels of deterioration and forces at work in our world. Environmental degradation stands on its own and as a metaphor for the smaller crumblings that feel astronomical to individuals but are insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Contemplating the smoking, burning land around her in “Fire Country,” Aronson writes “the air is thick/with other people’s fires. And my own burning/is so small as to go unnoticed.” Amid all the damage that our “toddler species” does to ourselves and our planet, the individual struggles seem trivial.

Yet Aronson’s poems continually validate the significance of griefs, “those awkward pointed stars/there is no easy way to hold,” no matter how small they seem in the cosmic scheme of things. We’re reminded that even seemingly evanescent things have its importance and impact, even “the petal of your life which is brief, which is delicate and weightier than you know,” as is the chrysanthemum that gives the poem its name.

Even as its focus involves death, the cyclic nature of life crops up periodically in the collection as Aronson reminds us that those we are losing once stood in our shoes. Parenthood comes into a new focus when seen from the middle position of both being and raising a child: the “endless falling and fear of failing” that we don’t understand until we enter.

The range of responses to grief, including the struggle against the inevitable, give the collection depth and authenticity. There’s angst, resistance to the prospect of loss, anxiety, magical thinking, and eventually, a tentative consideration of the future without. “Maybe there will be hauntings,” the speaker muses in “Manifestation,” or “breaths/in the still air at significant moments, tea leaves/I will ask for advice.” We don’t get a neat resolution, a fully processed grief—instead, we stand with the speaker and look forward to a future that will come, even when we can hardly think about what it could be.

Little goes unexamined in Anchor, though “Ode” hints at a strain of deliberate identity shift, duplicity even, that piques readers’ curiosity in its difference from the other themes woven through the collection. A few other poems touch on the speaker’s own complex identity—namely “The Dress I Loved” and “Is That All There Is?”—but we’re left wanting just a bit on this front.

Like many of the best poetry collections, Anchor does not give its readers an easy ride, but the resulting catharsis, coupled with the lyricism of Rebecca Aronson’s verse, make this book a deeply moving and worthwhile read.

Making the Right Narrative: Eve and All the Wrong Men by Aviya Kushner

“You have no idea what happens when you make one creature out of another,” warns the speaker of one of Aviya Kushner’s poems. Her chapbook Eve and All the Wrong Men (dancing girl 2019) makes the brave choice to revisit the biblical first woman so often featured in literature. Unlike other treatments, though, Kushner’s poems focus on transformation of self-in-relation to fully separate self. Her modern Eve refreshes the myth by dealing not with sin or sensuality but the (re)modeling of identity through encounters with the wrong men.

The women in Kushner’s poems share in the female legacy: “I was taught I had no choice/but to inherit Eve’s path on earth.” Eve, responsible for the downfall of Eden and for original sin, set women up as the gullible, subordinate sex. Eve positions us, as women, in an existence defined relative to men rather than independent beings. Rather than accept the limits of this legacy, though, Kushner sets out to find the “wrong men,” responsible on some level for perpetuating the limits women face.

The titular wrong men walk the pages of the book, often overheard at breakfast tables trying to make desirable partners of themselves using whatever tools they can assemble, one being language. Praising everything the desired woman says as “interested, interesting, interest, and oh yeah, incredible,” he hopes to hear himself reflected back in his partner, as the original Adam did of Eve. “Honey From the Wrong Men” finds language manipulated even more insidiously for consumption: “a whole bakery in the mouths of men, /saying anything for a taste.” In hearing the words, a woman knows she equates to transient pleasure, but being a delight “at least for the next hour” can be seductive. At best, these men are irritatingly amusing. At their most insidious, these men subsume the women they pursue, and “take me into how he read/the world.” The goal, then, is to come away from the wrong men with something of the self intact, which mostly happens.

Regret and relief at times collide in intriguing ways for the speaker. In “Perspective,” the speaker sees clearly “The life I could have had/stands in front of me,/wrong as the wrong man.” What was lost and perhaps once longed for becomes clear as “the angle of the wrong,” suddenly sharp and blindingly visible. “Bed” extends this sentiment to the ex married to another woman, and the gratitude at having escaped her fate. Identity, here, comes from the breakaway: who she could have been but did not become so.

When it comes to the women Kushner wants to be, readers find she admires the unsuspecting but authentic female. In “Imagining the Thoughts of the Lovely Eighty-Something Woman with the Vintage Glasses, Who Lives a Few Floors Down,” the speaker lives as unapologetically as any woman can ever hope to live. “I am who I am,” she says, “like the sea is the sea.” While her life has its imperfections (a flaky neighbor whose inattentiveness leaves the speaker to go out in the cold and snow), her soul is satisfied by the view from her window, augmented by her imagination. She first admires these “utterly man-less, there at the end” women in “Men” for the way they don’t want to be her, young and man-seeking. There’s a similar awe, if not admiration, for the “toothless hooker” who attracts a constant stream of men despite her unflattering appearance.

If the collection leaves us wanting in any way, it does so perhaps in the art poems. While David and Venus of Urbino certainly channel themes of sensuality and male/female dynamics, they are static figures in a collection that is constantly moving, flitting from encounter to encounter as it studies the sexual politics dogging women since Eden. Kushner is most successful when spreading gathered detail across the page or starting hard truths in the face.

Ultimately, Eve and All the Wrong Men leaves us with a modern Eve in the form of a woman seeking to reclaim and remodel herself separate from the men who wrote her into the character they wished her to be. Through all her transformations, she has made self-determination out of her inheritance.