Bird of Ashes and Fire: Toti O'Brien reviews SURVIVING HOME by Katerina Canyon

“Here is my pain,” says a poem from Katerina Canyon’s newest collection, Surviving Home. “Consume it.” And it ends, “Then do absolutely nothing.”

Canyon’s pain, stark naked and shining, is what the book unveils for the reader. Without a single doubt, it’s a pain that inherently resists consumption. It’s the pain of the Phoenix, bird of ashes and fire, lava and resurrection, introduced as Canyon’s spirit-animal in a poem that adds to the intensity permeating all verses a sudden, bright vein of humor. This Phoenix has short, black feathers and looks like a stubborn chicken, pecks at bugs and roosts on the windowsill of a hospital room. Where else should a Phoenix be? Barely reborn, yet soon bound to burn again—as like Icarus, she can’t help flying towards the sun—it isn’t someone’s chimera. It is the real thing.

So, what does resurrect from its own ashes? Is it the poet? The poetry? Is it memory? Is it pain itself? I believe what is meant to stay is the inextricable mesh the book is made of, the tight tapestry of suffering and resilience, experience and reflection, witnessing and rebellion.

“Here is my pain,” Canyon writes, and there’s a holy echo to her words, as if she were hoisting a calyx and saying, “this is my blood.” The same biblical quality is found in the first poem, “Involuntary Endurance.” Since the opening lines, “My story is not one revealed with chapter / And verse. It is expressed in blood and bone,” a new genesis is announced. The word becomes flesh.

Sparsely, yet throughout the book, the poet carries a conversation with the kind of god who is a white, male, supposedly loving father. The dialogue is a peer-to-peer exchange. Canyon doesn’t forgive this god who allows pain to be widely and unevenly distributed. She looks straight in his eye, unafraid to let him know she doesn’t abide by his rule. As the book proceeds, we feel that the balance between human and divine shifts, that the girl who talks back to god wins the argument, takes things into her hands. And we trust her. It is she that we now believe. There’s a holiness to this poetry collection, as boldly and blatantly secular as it is. A profound, human holiness.

What pain is this? Societal gravity funnels pain so that the heaviest burden weighs on black women. Even more, depending on when and where they are born. Add childhood, and you’ve got the vantage point from which Canyon writes. So the pain she refers to is the agony endured by the square inch of skin, the inch cube of female/black bone that supports in its whole the magma of the world.

Still, with the sheer honesty that is her true signature, the poet manages to shun the spotlight, identifying a locus of more suffering. In one of the indelible poems she devotes to her younger brother, she talks about whiplashes. “I just remember / Twitching as is each crack were / Against my back

But they were not. I am just a witness.
I hover through storms and report
The heat index of memories.

Father’s whip stopped when the scream of the child stopped. This is the brother to whom the book is dedicated, the boy who’s locked inside a closet all day when he howls his bothering “rabbit scream.” The elder sister is sent in as well, “as a sedative.” The routine is narrated in a poem that is central to the book both physically and metaphorically. The dark closet where the siblings are bundled and confined is a womb in which—like the phoenix—they will find a way of being reborn. Rather, to re-create the world they unwillingly were born into. It is the alchemic athanor allowing them to transform the one thing on which they have control: their perception. Their imagination. There, in captive suspension, paradoxically they will find inner freedom. They will turn the world on its hinges, like an afterimage, and decide the cell in which they are entombed is an open, luminous immensity.

Perhaps.

Father-with-the-lash, father closet, father shark, father snake has no mercy and the book has no mercy on him, yet doesn’t pronounce verdicts. Father is a dispenser of pain, a main instrument of pain, yet a vehicle too, as pain passing through his hands is bigger than he is, and comes from further back, elsewhere.

Also strength and resilience come from far. Among Canyon’s most moving poems are those highlighting vertical legacy, the lesson of black women from the past (“Sojourner”) and especially the mother-daughter, mother-son bonds. From “Playing with Roses”:

Your talent resides
somewhere within me

Memory is enough
to make it bloom
[…]
We are daughter and mother
Bound by the same sanguine root

From “Before God”:

When you cried, I nursed
you in bitter milk.
Breaching through secrets,
you asked
if I ever wanted you.

Shouting through clouds
My son, I wanted you
before my own birth,

Before first sword cut to stone.
Bathe in my tears, my blood
Know that I wanted you
Before God.

Love legacy is so deeply felt and expressed, it seems to imperceptibly lift the overwhelming weight of abuse. At least show another path, another perspective.

A few poems touch at language in interesting ways. From “Scrabble”:

[…]                 Some letters are

worth more than others. Some words
worthless, as the tiles reveal.

[…]
When it’s over, I’m left with a blank.

A long conversational poem (“I Left Out ‘Bells and Whistles’”) enumerates words and expressions coeval with the poet’s birth (from “magnet school” to “assault weapon”, from “black-on-black” to “delegitimize”)—a smart, subtle way to show how heavily an era-and-society’s clichés affect those they directly concern.  

In a similar way, this collection made me ponder a trope of our present time—“trigger”—all too naturally associated with Canyon’s powerful poems. Content triggers. I am often perplexed by their practical application, but this book made me doubt the concept itself. Made me ask how legitimate “triggers” are, when it comes to poetry. When it comes to this.

She says, “Here is my pain.”

Look and listen. Then, let it resonate.