Winter Hours Working Life

“What is autobiography but a story rich and impossible of completion—an intense, careful, expressive, self-interested failure? What can I say to you, therefore, that will be true, and will cast its shadow or its light over the whole body of my telling, of my being here, or who I am?”

-from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

Essays and Poems:

Snow drifted like sand across the road in front of me. Our car felt lighter without the backseat weighed down by all the books my wife and I had culled from our shelves to prepare for our move. I wasn’t concerned that the rear tires would lose traction because I had driven in the Midwest for a half dozen winters.

Lauren had moved with me from our families in Florida to Iowa where I attended grad school and she got a job working at a nonprofit. After earning my MFA and marrying each other, we stayed. I struggled to find work beyond odd jobs. I feared the security of an office job that would cause me to not want to sit and write before or after work. I couldn’t live on my writing, or at least I couldn’t afford to write for an economic living. And I didn’t want to teach writing because I feared losing what I loved to do.

I had been frozen.

The car’s trunk was filled with a tarp, a ground pad, a sleeping bag, boots, and an external framed bright blue pack that I hadn’t used since crossing over from Cub to Boy Scouts by earning my Arrow of Light and then quitting in sixth grade. I was driving, alone, south to Missouri for a Wilderness First Responder course. I was about to begin a new path toward a non-seasonal job; it seemed like I was always getting a job that didn’t work out. The WFR course would complete my training for an environmental educator job out in Moab, Utah. The only thing I knew about the place was Edward Abbey’s cranky national park memoir Desert Solitaire where he wasn’t really alone; he just wrote his wife and child out of the book.

Underneath the road atlas on the empty passenger seat was a book I couldn’t help buying when I sold our books at a used store. It was a book that I read when I first started writing. A book by a living writer who was a poet but wrote prose in beautiful, quiet sentences that I would come to learn as lyrical. It was a book that began my writing life. A teal upper half of sky, between a navy sailboat cutting along the horizon on top of a turquoise half of sea.

*

The dust jacket was replaced by forest green vinyl. White Arial font stamped on the spine to read Oliver. The book sat on the poetry shelves back by the bathrooms in the University of Central Florida’s library. I probably picked the book because it was thin and our undergrad workshop class was reading Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook. We had to read several collections during the spring semester and then write a report after each one.

I still have a digital copy of my assignment on Oliver’s self analysis of her poem “The Swan.” I must have skipped Oliver’s first essay “Building a House”—a hard working piece about constructing a tiny shed from locally found scrap: a metaphor for writing a poem—and I doubt that I read the entire book, which is why I wanted to re-read my first encounter with Oliver, or rather, completely read Oliver and write back to that time in my life.

In my paper, I wrote that Oliver “held characteristics of a significant poem” with three musts—or as Oliver actually wrote, “rules”—for herself: 1.) genuine body, 2.) sincere energy, and 3.) spiritual purpose.

I didn’t consider that Oliver also wanted “the poem to ask something, and at its best moments, [she] want[s] the question to remain unanswered.” Oliver believes that a reader must answer the question.

I wrote that “The Swan” included concrete images (genuine body), its shape matched the motion of the animal (sincere energy), and that Oliver suggested heaven incarnate as imagination on earth (spiritual purpose). I don’t know if I knew what I was writing about.

When I read “The Swan” again in a basement apartment before my week-long WFR sessions I could see that Oliver had shaped her zigzagging enjambment like the floating little boat of a swan, or perhaps Shelley’s sailboat that Oliver laments capsizing in a final storm, drifting toward shore and the revelation of its hopeful landing as a joy of survival and the poem itself as an answer to what to do: live, and then write.

Rescue

What is forgiveness anyway but a terrifying and true opening—a dangerous, purposeful, affective, selfless vulnerability? What could Jakob say to us, right there, that would uncloak the shadow of death he had seen as he served in the oven of the continual Gulf war and took with him on the freezer of Antarctica, as we shared stories already dead and stories yet to live?

When the bloated body bobbed on the ocean, the face tight and white, and the helicopter’s rotors chopping the salty air, he knew the only thing he could do: plop down next to it, or hate. And he plopped, a gloop of a body made of water into a body of water, next to a body soggy with more water. He grasped that slick skin, so they both bobbed on the surface as a rope was flung out of the chopper. But the body did not know it was saved, or if it did its capacity to know was gone with whatever selfish will was gone, the body did not gasp like any living mammal hurled into water and only wanting air, that time was gone, and the body floundered in the ocean.

Years later, Jakob did not see the person in the water. In spite of the winch that hauled them both up where they had plunged in, the body wasn’t a person with a job, or hobbies, or family; it was a bag of meat and bones.

And I thought: I will need to remember that in the wilderness. The bobbing, the plopping, the grasping, and the hauling. Then the surrender of saving, of soul. Then the clear dryness of sanitizer. And the ocean: the depth and the apathy.

The Betrayer

From the beginning she had doubted. By from the beginning I mean as soon as we dated. It was terrible. At first I wondered, What is it? I would be driving, and she would be the passenger. As from the cold of space and unfathomable distance, not retuning but meteoring, the feeling rushed and entered and struck and embedded and settled and stayed.

Always, I wondered, How is she feeling about everything? What’s going on? She would write, I don’t know. I don’t want to hurt him. I gave my heart away before him. And line after line she wrote in her diary, betraying.

Do I know her? I think. I thought. Bangs and pubes. Hangry and frisky. Sadness and giddiness. Disappointment, too. And the commitment. And for all that, does she know me? Who is this person I married less than a year ago?

This dense, opaque, scared betrayer.

“You can have the other words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.”

-from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

Four Poets:

The circle of desk-chairs all faced inward. Every class we workshopped a couple of poems. We said what we thought the poem was about. We said whether we liked the poem or not, and why. We said how the student could improve the poem by breaking lines, swapping out words, or creating rhyme. We said we didn’t know if it was poem. We said, “This image is cliché.” We said, “This image is killer.” We agreed with each other. We disagreed with our instructor. We considered whether or not the poem needed to be confessional, lyrical, narrative, etc.

I turned in sentimental writing. I wrote a sonnet about leaving love notes under the windshield of an ex-girlfriend’s car. I wrote an elegy to my dead grandparents. I wrote a prose-poem about the poor infrastructure and daily grind of a city. I wrote a found poem with lines about God holding the world in His hands.

I remember four undergrads who wrote stellar poems, people who were poets—who inspired me to work at my writing—because they could work their imagination into funny, loving, nostalgic, and urgent writing: Matt Harrison—this sly, lip-pierced, too tight T-shirted, and jeaned guy—who satirically wrote “The One That Got Away” from the point-of-view of an old Ash Ketchum reminiscing about the battle that he lost to capture a Pokèmon. Christina Johnson—this small, quiet gal with sepia blouses that matched her Polaroid photos she took, and corduroy pants like a couch’s slipcover that I wanted to lie my head on—with her “Floral Prints” about a husband who reupholsters a yard sale armchair for his wife who ends up dying before he does and leaving her shape in the cushions. Keri Smith—this strong, but shy gal with a canvas of tattoos, before everyone inked up, down on her skin including beta fish swimming in the fish bowl of her clavicle, a horse skull on her bicep, a pizza slice melting on her shin, and a percolator on the other leg that spilled out the word bubble, “Death before decaf!”—who wove Lorca’s verse Ni hay nadie que, al tocar un recien nacido, olvide las inmoviles calaveras de caballo into her poem “A Death Full of Light” where she walked through her parents’ barn while remembering her little girl self who loved to ride. Curtis Meyer—this functioning Asperger’s guy with slick button ups and slacks, whose voice boomed like an oracle that he raised as a slam poet—and his poem “Value” that tallied all the lives of cells in our bodies that we are responsible for, and that to live isn’t, but actually really is, “no pressure.”

Four poets’ obsessions captivated Oliver and she, too, was inspired to write by their work: Poe’s uncertainty caused by the continual deaths of dark-curled, high-foreheaded, large-eyed, ill women so much like his mother, including his surrogate mother Frances Allan and later his wife (and cousin!) Virginia Clemm who revisited him in “The Haunted Palace.” Frost’s bittersweet control with meter, and fame, as he was put on a pedestal as a Popular Poet (capital Ps!) for being a pastoral poet with a vulnerability written in “My November Guest.” Hopkins’ release from the rigorous Jesuit order with joyful language (rejoice!) on the page where he was constantly “Hurrahing in Harvest.” Whitman (oh, Whitman! her Whitman!) who after caring for the dying as a nurse in the Civil War replicated a miracle of resurrection with his life long rewriting of Leaves of Grass.

“Once I came upon two angels, they were standing quietly, keeping guard beside a car. Light streamed from them, and a splash of flames lay quietly under their feet. What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready?”

-from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

Intermission:

Sand Dabs Seven*

Danger comes from above and around you.

*

Don’t do CPR if there is chest trauma, the person is dead, the person is speaking to you, if a body is rotting, if a heart is outside the body, if a head is not attached to the body, if the scene is unsafe.

*

You won’t know when your judgment fails you.

*

In the documentary “A Dozen More Turns,” a group of Alaskan grad school skiers gets caught in an avalanche on Mt. Nemesis. One of them snaps his leg and another dies.

“They should have known better,” an urban EMT in the WFR course says.

Would we have known any better?

*

The best container for water is your body.

*

Lightning spreads like a stream. The electrical charge flows along the ground gathering ions and then bolts up into the clouds. The safest place to be in a field, during a thunderstorm, is not down, but on a buoy of earth.

*

We have killed so many rattlesnakes that rattlesnakes now self-select to not grow rattles.

*

Six “Sand Dabs” are spread throughout three of Oliver’s books: Winter Hours, Blue Pastures, and West Wind. The sand dab is a small, bony, significant but well-put-together fish.

“I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of _____. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope.”

-from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

Winter Hours:

What is failure except the lack of achieving a goal? A gulf, chasm, gulch, arroyo, valley—separation of place. You compete but you are defeated. You try but you don’t make it—somewhere. You don’t land. You drift. You carry the fault that didn’t enable you to succeed. You are the cause of your own let down.

What is mercy except underserved leniency, relief, and release?

*

Because the sessions began at 8:30AM I woke in darkness to journal my WFR training experience and to jot down the curious and inspiring bits of Winter Hours.

The ground-level studio was warm, almost damp since I ran a space heater all night long. The coils glowed as orange as coals and a fan spun, blowing beneath the bed and rising up to me tucked under a comforter. Double doors lead into the one room with a kitchenette and bathroom stall. The studio fit snug under the deck of a social worker’s house. She rented out the space cheaper than a hotel room.

I woke alone in the navy room. The walls were painted light blue and the trim and floorboard and doors were painted a darker blue, but it all looked nearly black like a bruise until I turned on a light.

I worked at a table quadranted off with four stools that tucked underneath, by the legs. Rarely did I experience being alone in the quiet. I did, and didn’t, like it. I liked turning over my thoughts without distraction, except for the distraction that there wasn’t any distraction—that there wasn’t my cat or Lauren or anybody I really knew in the entire state.

I have known loneliness even with being with someone. Or perhaps not loneliness, but despair.

After my journaling and a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal, I suited up in wool socks, long underwear, a turtleneck, synthetic T-shirt, Carhartt pants, a fleece pull-over, an insulated canvas jacket, a scarf, hat with ear flaps, mittens, and waterproof ankle boots. I felt in uniform—that I had a purpose, a duty, to save lives; myself included.

The winter morning air crackled and I steamed, walking up the frosty hill to my car parked at a lesser angle. I turned over the ignition, warming up the oil and the engine. Exhaust plumed from the tailpipe, escaping into the brightening sky.

*

I had pulled up and shut our garage door. I didn’t like the work I did even though it more than paid the bills. I drove a bus at odd hours of the day, on-calls, and Saturday nights since I was ranked 101 out of 120 drivers. I would sit all day and pay close attention to the road around town and the mall and the university and downtown and everywhere else in between. It wasn’t mindless, it was mindful; exhausting.

Ironically, I had to drive the direct 5 minutes to and from work because I couldn’t regularly catch the bus in time before my shifts. I would have had to ride for 20 minutes and then wait at least another 10 minutes adding an unpaid extra hour to each day.

I felt strapped into my position. I couldn’t just quit. What would I do in Ames that would pay as much? How would I afford to live? How could I go on riding the wheel and feeling unchallenged, but also depleted?

My vision clouded. I switched the fog lights on. Their orange beams cast caution in the filling garage.

I thought about staying. Lauren and I had had a confrontation. I don’t know what to call it. A non-physical fight? An empty debate? An emotional conversation?

We had been married for less than one year. Winter’s coldness still froze the nights of early spring and the tulip bulbs hadn’t sprouted. She didn’t know. I didn’t know. The commitment felt like too much, something we weren’t prepared for. Would this—the unrest, the doubt, the nausea—ever end?

The intoxicating exhaust settled in. It was a thicker smell than the sweetness at the gas pump. Should I get out? I thought about driving off, to not even consider the next thing with work, with Lauren, with my life. It would be even easier to just let the engine run motionless in the garage and floor the pedal so the carburetor would open for gas to flow and burn and take me away.

I turned the key and took it out. I huffed out a toxic breath and opened the car door and waded through the gray haze. I exited all that.

*

I have never planned to live in the west. I’d been to Colorado as a youth. Once, Lauren and I had visited friends in New Mexico for Albuquerque’s hot air balloon festival. Then, we had honeymooned in Portland, Oregon for a food festival, but spent most of our time at Powell’s Books. We came to know the upper Midwest almost as well as the East Coast and the South where we thought we would return.

I have not forgotten how it feels to be a stranger in a strange land. I still felt strange even after living five years in Iowa. I came to enjoy the corn and casseroles as much as the sand and sweet tea of Florida. I could spot a bur oak better than a magnolia, but I never saw prairie rose while my parents’ neighborhood had multiple orange trees, their blossoms zesting with the acidic hint of future citrus. I loved spotting an Eastern goldfinch darting in a flash above hostas while I detested the hidden repeating and annoying mockingbird mimicking a car alarm from a scrub pine.

I love to figure out the layout of a town, where the roads, trails, stores, houses, and restaurants unfortunately cut down the trees and plants and land. I like the sense of structure, or order, while also wanting those green spaces to wildly push up through the concrete and plywood and rebar. I go to all of the same places a few times to find out what they have and at what cost and how they serve or neglect people. I decide between one or two places and then continue going there. I settle.

*

From one of the three needs—dwelling—came work in Iowa, occasionally by willingness, or skill. One morning I shoveled dirt from a truck bed into a wheelbarrow and rolled the loads to the backyard of a retired special ed teacher. When I dumped the load, my forearms strained and flexed and released with the tip of dense soil.

I worked with a guy I knew. Work always came from some guy, some project, for some person’s home. Where they already lived. I had cut out windows and sealed flashing under new ones; scraped off paint from Craftsman roofs’ peaks and shellacked on fresh coats; and yanked out pink insulation from rim joists in basements—that would be replaced with sawed foam board, its blue staticky minuscule debris clinging to my jeans—the fiberglass speckled my skin but only cleared in a cold shower so my heated skin’s pores wouldn’t relax and open and accept the shards.

I raked the loads of dirt along a rectangle of 2x4s that would become a cement patio. The rectangle that contained the slurry of concrete was called “the form.” Not a frame, because a frame held a wall before sheets of plywood and then drywall were hammered and hung in place. I loved the language of construction, how the words worked.

Inside the form we crosshatched rebar to support the slurry so the soon-to-seal cement wouldn’t crack. Cement traps water. In basements cement will moisten, feel damp, and then sweat.

We walk on water every day. This is no blind path of faith. This is the road of work.

*

For years, in the afternoons, I walked down Clark Avenue. Down as in south. Down as in the slope of Ames toward downtown. Down as in whatever to call the spiral and drain and loss of purpose.

On the east sidewalk I treaded hundreds of times. For several seasons I walked to get the sun, even though my home office had a south-facing reading chair. I would follow the shine before the rays filtered through the tree line and then dipped behind the tree line and well before the sun slipped off the edge of the Midwest. Walking out the door was the most difficult step; to go without a need to get anywhere else, but away. I was getting away from loneliness, from a distancing muteness close to neglect. Sometimes in winters between odd jobs and indoor work I wouldn’t talk to anyone except for Lauren the whole gray day.

I didn’t know I would encounter people on my walks, but I did. These were neighbors without names. I guessed they had come to town for the university, or perhaps the railroad. Most likely to get away from farming. They retired and got old and then they were there in their front windows or lawns or gardens. The sweatpantsed man standing on his couch who I wondered if he was tantruming over the cable news or screwing in an overhead light bulb. The lady who shuffled down her driveway to shout, “Stop!” at the rampant Solomon’s seal. The deaf woman who smiled when I gestured at her lilies. The stay-at-home dad raking leaves into piles or shoveling snow or mowing the lawn or seeding the lawn and then giving me the manly nod and, depending on the season, the brim-of-hat tap.

*

The seasons change. Now an ice storm threatens the end of the WFR weeklong course since the University of Missouri will close the next day. So, tonight, this Thursday, we test out. Answering a multiple-choice test and then splint a leg with a book, pad, jacket, and p-chord. I use Southwestern Homelands, my North Face, a classroom pad, and borrowed rope. I’m in the odd group, the only pair with a plus one. The geography master’s student researching digital terrorism and the undergrad athletic trainer. I forget to include a trucker’s knot in my simple loop and so my half-hitches come loose from femur to shin and the instructor doesn’t like that we’re last. At last, I re-do the entire splint and then we lose the personal trainer to another pair for the final assessment of clearing a spine after a positive mechanism of injury (read: someone fell from a height).

Of course, I support the geography student’s neck and I know where to look for any bruising behind his ears and how to dab his earlobe to check for any cranial fluid leaking and palpate his back and test the feeling in his palm and pinch his fingerpads for capillary refill and take his pulse and cover his eyes to see if the pupils equally and reactively respond to light and create a c-brace with his fleece jacket and ask him his name, where he is, and what month it is. Pain is the answer I don’t want to receive from any question; I ask as he moves his head on his neck left then right and then up and finally down like the cardinal directions, east and west, and north and south. Finally, Dan, at Mizzou, during January, is cleared.

There is a place on the road home where my eyes droop while listening to the Black-Eyed Blonde on CD. I roll the windows down when the exhumed Philip Marlowe isn’t enough to keep me awake. How the chill snaps my eyes fully open! I stagger the stops I make for coffee so I don’t crash with the lack of caffeine or the jittery blur of happiness, returning to Lauren.

During the WFR course, Lauren and I texted and talked to continue to dwell together even as we were apart and were readying to leave. Overnight, I drive to our garage, to our place, to our door that we continue to open for each other.

*

Darkness is the best time to write. I mean my emotional and woken and environmental state. Perhaps something wrong or just rising or shadowed, the thing that needs lightening, lightning, light, is what I like to work with.

In the act of writing an essay, I am loyal, and wandering. As much as I can I neglect the rest of the day—hunger, work, communication—and attempt to submerge in my mind both memory and how I recall. I think, What do I know? What I consider is a tangle to undo and then weave into something useable. Oliver writes of hearing a song, a whisper, a voice. I am no Oliver yet, but I know of that language inside myself. Every essayist attempts to listen to it. You can learn the rules for the dance, but not the feel. You can hope for talent, but not style. Hope for ability. It is real and spiritual. It is a possession, and ephemeral. Perhaps it’s why I jot on scrapes of paper and then scribble them together on lined notebooks. My laptop only helps me get the supplies in order, ready to construct.

*

I could not be an essayist without work. Someone else could. But not me. For me, the experiences pile up. During a driving shift, in a garden plot, or on a ladder I work toward a physical exhaustion that fills a mental reserve—a tap to pour out with writing. I learn, and then write, how doing something affects me.

Perhaps I’m a working writer. But there’s always a tension between needing to work and wanting to write but not wanting to write for work. I also don’t want to be a communist or union organizer or whatever would be a writer writing for workers. I document my own labor: pay, hours, and skill and treatment and interpersonal relationships and lack of lunch breaks. What I write begins with the shifts and doesn’t end after work. Maybe I would become an activist if I got comfortable. But I haven’t. I don’t consider the gross domestic product, international trade agreements, or inflation rates. I am just going to work and riding the wheel, digging with a trowel, slinging a brush and then coming home with an experience. This is an unfortunately usual way to live—non-mystical, scraping by.

The world makes a distinction between work: digging ditches or going to meetings. There is a false divide between the same sort of taxing menial, repetitive tasks. You strain your back or you widen your ass. What’s the difference between physical and mental jobs? Education, opportunity, nepotism? There are carpenters torquing nails out of siding who spend nights reading Cormac McCarthy. There are English professors writing mysteries who cut cedars with a chainsaw. There are research scientists advocating for rye as cover crop who fill their freezers with hunted waterfowl. There are bakers punching down swollen sourdough who practice transcendental meditation. There are vegetable farmers spot weeding brussel sprouts who attend racial equality town halls. The world is made up of fiber optic cables, ballpoint pens, and screws. A diesel is alive. The screen of the phone and the screen inset on a hinged door that lets in the flow, but not the bugs, is circulatory. There is breath in all work.

What I want to emanate in my essays is the feeling—both physical and emotional—of knowing the job, the trajectory toward mastery that occurs on a no set-up turn, the pluck of a taproot, or the slide of a primer coat.

There is something special in this, I believe. It creates something. Writing work is a way of clocking-in with a subject. You become what it is. With your muscle—brain or brawn—you live as you work. The muse is the planned, the effortful, the constructed—not the flighty, the sporadic. You work, and you notice. You are purposeful in order to be fulfilled. You consider how to do a job by doing it, and then telling it. Each evening, you come home and your beloved says—always—How was work? The answer comes as a narrative reconstructed.

*

Lauren and I met when we were in our early twenties. For myself it was so adult—a shared bed and split bills. Coupling. We have lived together for a half-dozen years, without an end. I have told lots about it. Confession, the over-share in our selfish world, has been a catharsis of youth. We are forgiven, and we try again. We are both yoked, and maturing, together. Repeat: we are forgiven, and we try again. We work with sincerity, goofiness, kindness, and forgiveness. Whenever I write something angry it lacks my life with Lauren. Whenever I write something hopeful it is my heart yearning to live it with Lauren. This is my life’s work.

Women in the Study Reported Feeling Pain

Sometimes, when I’m having trouble expressing myself, I wish that I could somehow give people access to my brain, so that they could experience what it’s like in there for a while. I consider how my mind would work as a piece of art or literature. I repeat the phrase publish my brain to myself. With The Second Body, Claire Donato has succeeded in publishing hers. By opening this book you are submerging yourself in a mind. Thoughts and ideas flood in through your ears and nose. Words bully their way through your pores. Your entire being becomes saturated. You are at once inside of the book/mind and it is inside of you. While you explore its passages and personality, it is probing you at the same time. I had the disconcerting feeling that the book was creating a mold of my own mind, studying it and making adjustments.

In her blurb of the book, Kate Durbin asks, “What is The Second Body?” This is a valid question. While this collection is full of bodies, they are rarely identified. The focus is not on their external features but the experience of being inside them. There in no joy to that experience in these poems. Just as pain is one of the inherent features of having a body, pain is a feature of this book. Durbin’s question is answered in the title poem, where Donato writes, “We can expect painful experiences (the first body)./ The second body is the suffering.” This suffering takes a range of forms, from the everyday (“Later, at home, a translucent blister”), to the more unexpected (“Antlers germinate like lumps and extend outward from my mind”), but it is all female suffering.

It seems clear that The Second Body is the female body. The title a reference to Eve being created after Adam, the literal second body, or an echo of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. But, as should be expected, the title refers inward as well: there is plenty of doubling and mirroring happening here. Throughout the collection, the speaker refers to “My friend Claire”, suggesting that this voice doesn’t belong to Claire Donato but to some second, unknown body. And bodies aren’t the only things that are twinned. In the poem “The Second Body Is a Shield”, Donato writes, “Imagine a pure gold ring. Divide it in half, then keep/ Dividing and dividing and dividing.” This type of multiplication by division appears throughout the book, but another example comes from this same poem: “Now she carries a dense/ Second body in her brain, a second body not unlike/ The first”. The woman herself is divided in two. So perhaps The Second Body isn’t simply the female body but the imagined female body, which in itself has been the cause of plenty of pain.

Although The Second Body focuses on pain, that is not its only preoccupation. This is a book of obsessions. In addition to bodies and pain, it is also full of time, language, architecture, the environment. Donato is even preoccupied by obsession itself as she writes about cataloguing and exhibition. But everything always returns to the body. These other things can only be experienced through the mediation of a body. And so boys become horses and women mutate into light and tables. Death is ever present in the collection, from the epigraphs at the front of the book to “Manifesto La Terre / Mori”, the title of the final poem. But while death may be the end of a person, it is not the end of a body, so the book continues forward as the corpses fall behind it.

No matter which of her obsessions she is focusing in on, Donato treats her subject with a light, deft hand. One note I made while reading was: “Assured voice. Masterful. Unexpected turns.” Whereas I often have trouble expressing myself, with these poems Donato shows no such difficulty. She is always in complete control, not only an expert on whichever subject she is addressing at any given time but also approaching it in the perfect way, whether that is scientific jargon or humorous line breaks, eight words scattered across a page or lines so long they must be printed landscape. The emergence of a writer with such command of both form and content is rare and it should be celebrated when it does occur. Having mastered both body and mind, I have no idea what Donato will do next, but I’m excited to find out.

Rehabilitation of Language: A Review of Solmaz Sharif's Look

Solmaz Sharif’s debut collection of poems, Look (Graywolf Press 2016), embodies the imperative mood. For the United States Department of Defense, the title word also refers to a timespan “during which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence” in mine warfare. The corrective Sharif applies to this word in her opening poem is the book’s central line. “Let it matter what we call a thing,” she writes. “Let me LOOK at you in a light that takes years to get here.”

In the work that follows, Sharif works to rehabilitate terms used by the United States government in reference to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. “Daily I sit/ with the language/ they’ve made/ of our language,” she writes. Words retrieved from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms—neutralize, lay, patient, permanent echo, dormant, penetration aids—are writ large, all caps, so their double meanings can’t be missed.

There is so much here that compels—indelible details (“DAMAGE AREA/ does not include night sweats/ or retching at the smell of barbeque”), formal variety (the halting rhythms of state-censored letters; a partial list of military operations, i.e. CAVE DWELLERS, RAMADAN ROUNDUP, ARMY SANTA), and the poet’s courage to stand and aim squarely at such a high-value target. What makes the book most memorable to me is the clarity and shape of its argument. Sharif draws our eye to the tools of propaganda and swiftly flips them, illuminating their underpinnings, their casualties. Again and again, we encounter stark contrasts: estrangement and intimacy, vulnerability and power, gravity and humor, delicacy and force. These are not simple poems, but their mechanisms work simply: here are some words you’ve heard kicked around on TV, and here is who feels the effects of that kicking when the cameras cut away. Here is my baba holding up his pants at a security checkpoint, here are thimbles traced with sweat. Here is the fallout radius of weaponized language—it extends past the ground meat of ruined bodies to spare change that jumps at the slam of a door.

It may take some time to acclimate to Sharif’s dexterity, the layered voices. Throughout Look she samples (among others) the boastful voice of the U.S. military, detainees, an uncle slain in the Iran-Iraq war and dispassionate onlookers. There is noise and discomfort at seeing words in all caps invading poetry, which tends to be a domain of reflection and intimacy. A poem I have long been obsessed with, Frank Bidart’s epic 30-page “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky,” came to mind the first time I read Sharif’s title poem. Bidart’s Nijinsky also shouts on the page. Outwardly, there isn’t much yelling in poetry, but a deeper relationship between the two works can be seen here as well. In Sharif’s “Desired Appreciation,” a conversation with a psychiatrist reveals that the speaker feels like she must muzzle herself, that she feels dangerous, feels like a threat. In “Nijinsky,” the protagonist’s mind is poisoned by his proximity and relationship to World War I. Nijinsky wrestles with the question of whether he is insane or evil, and resolves it through his ultimate and final performance: he will dance the story of the war and in doing so “become the Body through which / the War has passed.” This same quote from “Nijinsky” opens Sharif’s last section, a clear signal from the poet: I live inside this war. Look at me, twisting from its paradoxes.

The length of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq habituated so many passionate dissenters into a kind of resignation, the slinking posture of but-what-can-we-do. But Sharif’s collection activates the role of observer by stunning back into awareness the wounds that still suppurate, lighting the holes cut from language and their respective tears in American thinking. We can look, look differently, persist in looking—that’s a thing we can do.

Life Sucks, Let's Go Shopping!

Marisa Crawford’s Big Brown Bag, my copy of it, anyway, begins with a hand-written epigraph that reads “life sucks, let’s go shopping!”, emblazoned in the blue of the pen I’d just handed her.  The printed epigraph is equally telling: an excerpt from Plath’s The Bell Jar, something about discarded wardrobe items disappearing into the “dark heart of New York.”

Big Brown Bag is a little brown book that is simultaneously perfunctory and deeply profound; it paints a world in broad, plastic strokes, which yield to pure moments of bereavement, and which seem concurrently brooding and blithely consumerist: “I got the long black dress. The dress that leads to nowhere.”  Crawford’s mourning is deemed unavailing in this first line of the collection, but it provides the impetus for the poems to come, which are rife with strongly voiced juxtapositions in the vein of this first tidbit.

Goodie’s, the fictional department store where our protagonist has found employment, provides a backdrop where she can mask her devastation in the trappings of modish fashion and sticker-prices.  Ok, there aren’t sticker prices, but there is a tension between authentic feeling and the culture of buying cool shit: “I am floating toward the earrings and I am pulling toward the world.”

Crawford’s speaker is authentic in the sweetest way.  Not “sweet” like Little Bo Peep sweet, but “sweet” like things were sweet in the 90’s, when 8th graders wore Smashing Pumpkins shirts and watched The Breakfast Club as a rite of passage.  All of these things figure in the broader narrative of Big Brown Bag, as the collection is interested in the perennial MacGuffin of “growing up.”  The speaker has “grown up,” is as grown up as 30 is, and debauches in naiveté with the acumen of the poetic eye.

This is a collection that finds something like joy in the art of masking mourning in the mundanity of trend-shopping facilitation; it is an aggregate of verse-moments that recall the zenith of childhood’s ambition and carouses in its weird disaffection.  Mainly, though, it’s good.

These poems are plainly stated, sharp, and strongly voiced.  They are well-wrought, without a word misplaced, but they paint a speaker who is less sure-tongued.  The speaker happens upon a kind of insight that conflates the agony of loss with the quiet satisfaction of having replaced the vital parts.

Life sucks, let’s go shopping.  Let’s wear different blacks and ride them into the dark heart of wanton anonymity.  Pick up Marisa Crawford’s Big Brown Bag, put Gazing Grain Press’ fourth chapbook inside, and settle down for a good read.  You’ll find your sense of self negotiable, but forward motion is untenable without a degree of caprice.  “Memory is a tire.  Change it.  Go from there.”

The Erasure and Self-erasure of Women's Voices: A Review of Kristina Marie Darling's Women and Ghosts

The multiple modes of the erasure and self-erasure of women’s voices sit heavy with me this morning. I’ve read a beautiful and daring text entitled Women and Ghosts, by Kristina Marie Darling, which is part essay and part prose-poem, all experimental, where line-throughs, footnotes, multiple narrative lines, and alternating gradients of text are used to tell stories of female negations with silences and near silences—those that speak to the horror one can feel to realize that the acceptance of internalized conditioning to be less, to take up less space, is actually the most dangerous act a woman can commit or condone on a path to empowerment—and these have a long history. Kristina Marie Darling’s Women and Ghosts is a terrifying read, one well worth the time. For me, it felt like a beautiful funeral shroud, a gossamer wrap of a book I was reminded to cut myself free from in order to survive.

In this book, death, denial, self-sacrifice, and romance are inexorably linked. Gender and gender privilege are examined. The author is subversive in her inclusions and omissions, and the lines are meant to be catalysts toward appropriate rage. “In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia drowns under the weight of her own dress,” Women and Ghosts begins. “I had never imagined before that plain white silk could kill.”

But plain white silk didn’t kill, the reader may argue, jarred already by muted color of the words and the obvious falsehood they champion. Since when was a dress capable of killing? Enter now Darling’s world of realigning the reader’s reality by engaging in disruptive discourse. As the author expects the reader to remember, Ophelia, after losing her lover to palace intrigues, drowns herself in Hamlet. Surely her dress is not to blame, and neither is the water in which Ophelia, off-stage, drowns. At a deeper level, all readers familiar with Shakespeare’s play are aware that the lead character Hamlet’s rejection causes Ophelia’s complete self-immolation. And yet, in line one, Darling adjusts the narrative to hide the crime, makes excuses for it, blames a party blameless as a starry night or a sparkling lake, as written history often does, blurring the lines of blame in order to appropriately question them, where the dress in a virginal hue, ode to female innocence or purity, a highly gendered garment, takes betrayal’s place as villain.

Welcome to the nightmare gender labyrinth of refutation and disavowal. Not to read too much into this single line, but I already felt a chill travel my spine to see the exchange of correctly placed blame for self-defeating symbology and experienced a simultaneous awareness that this chill was intentionally created by the skillful author to highlight the contrast text the reader proceeds with as a paralleled modern “I” woman examines Ophelia’s plight and concurrently exists in a terrifying room where lovers spar and the ambient temperature grows colder and colder, as a modern man serves her joint bouts of gaslighting and liquor, tantamount to emotional abuse. Between doses of his cruelty and lack of returned care, in a sort of willful thought departure, the narrator muses on the aspects of Hamlet’s Ophelia plot most difficult and “unsayable,” at one point asking, “But what does it mean to give one’s consent? We are led and misled by those we love…” where a similar facility of displacement puts the reader right into the ghosted narrative of being two places at once, both interred in a historical play with a dead female victim of self-slaughter and standing in the midst of a new tragic history played out, where the “I” protagonist, already muted by pale ink, lives through a similar sort of identity reduction.

It is telling enough that this modern narrator says, “When he smiled, I felt my whole body grow colder,” where it seems as if a man’s cold judgment, masked by the false mirth of a smile, is on deliberate parallel with a lake in which to drown. Darling’s use of white space here, of incomplete interactions, of dissonance in the said/unsaid, is masterful.

Enter Shakespeare’s own words, often, as foil. Boldly on the pages that follow this opening line, interlacing at strategic intervals, the font periodically darkens, and the reader finds lined-through quotes from the bard, carefully excerpted to highlight the age old dilemma of inadequate self-valuation, of lost agency, of roles, one of such line-through excerpts reading, for example, “And I, of ladies most deject and wretched…”

Here we see the duality of the work’s intent. On the one hand, this text receiving line-through, seems an empowering strategy where Ophelia’s self-negation is defeated by being struck from the record by a female author. However, it is also a female author’s inclusion of a man’s depiction of a woman’s defeat in darker text than the narrative of the modern fictive woman beside it. As in a painting, a color is best read in context, beside another color—so, surrounded by the pale gray text of the I narrator, the stronger hue of a man’s words, lined out or not, seem to extend the struck sentiment well beyond the century in which it was crafted.

The status quo to be combatted, Darling’s line-through subtext seems to read, is hundreds of years of powerlessness in love. The status quo is women, in literature and life, silenced by men, whether they be those written by male authors as foils to kill for moments of tragic beauty in plays or simply real life lovers in the average living room scene of standard living—it is, after all, Shakespeare who killed Ophelia as a plot device, he who chose her undoing and drew a pretty bow on the tragedy of the tragedy of Hamlet. But you’ll note, in the tradition of entitling tragedies (Antigone, MacBeth, King Lear), that the title character is usually the protagonist. And Ophelia, memorable as she is, Darling wishes to remind us, has never had a play as her namesake. The tragedy was larger than the woman who died for it, her loss relegated to being just a pittance in another man’s more important drama.

It is a whirlwind ride to enter and learn the ways of reading this book, requiring more than just the absorption of words. One must stare at the pages and internalize the import in the way space and color is used. What is bold or shown in a darker font creates relevance in multiple sections where it seems a philosophical question has been asked of the reader, one with multiple hard answers. For my part, I found I was trained by the text to read with excitement when dark lines came, always hoping for more from a female voice rather than a male voice—yet, nearly each time Darling’s women spoke in dark font, what I came away with was a deepening sorrow where Darling had not given these women much voice but actually instead turned the screws of depicting a torturous silencing game, “my lord…my lord,” to reveal yet more dissection about how women’s institutionalized devaluation can be a learned, continuous, and self-regulating structure. It does so via reaching through much of Shakespeare’s canon—be forewarned, this book takes on more plays than solely Hamlet, pausing to meditate in women’s roles in others like Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Titus Andronicus, and more.

It then introduces the I character as a playwright and again establishes parallels between the doomed female characters in Shakespeare’s theatrical work and the hard work of women trying to write the matter that becomes publicly influential. A particularly difficult segment to read for this reader was the section called “Essays on Production,” where the “I” narrator discusses her work as an author of plays and the staging and reviews of her plays. For the entire segment, many pages long, the “I” character not only has a mute gray voice, a ghosted presence, but all her words are lined-through as well. Devastating. One excerpt that held my attention a good long while is found below, where a critic subjects our protagonist to the standard double-standard faced by women in the arts: Judgement made personal where slut-shaming is so ubiquitous it flows uncensored and there is no appropriate response for the artist to make since the artist, not the art, is on trial:

One critic did deliver a verdict, suggesting there must be some underlying reason that I cared so much about Ophelia, an unconscious obsession with the torn dress, a fixation on ruined clothing. I was the whore, the wronged beloved, the bride abandoned at the altar. I stood accused, but when I tried to plead my case, I found I could no longer speak.

So, if I am female, should I make myself more mute, are there more ways to do so, the narrative seems to ask the reader in multiple sections, with many strategies—and would you like to watch for how many centuries the same story of this abjuration repeats itself?

As Darling’s work in Women and Ghosts alternates between representations of Shakespearean women and scenes with or about her “I” narrator, the resultant despair that ensues for this reader is heightened when I am carried along as witness to the crimes, to the travesties, when the act of self-silencing as visible on the page actually serves as a cautionary tale to inspire agency for doing the opposite.

Perhaps an awakening for the reader was the goal of this book, the wake-up call, the warning. I am now awake. Thank you, Ms. Darling. One wants to test one’s voice after reading Women and Ghosts, to make sure it still works. Rarely does one read a book that holds such a narrative of disturbing dualities. Via stunning use of erasure and white space, Darling creates the kind of poetic narrative that twists the puzzles of representation in so many directions that the reader comes to live in both the darkness and the lightness of the font, in its presence and its absence.

Women and Ghosts is a trompe l’oeil of a book.   Inspired is the word I’d use to describe it, difficult, revelatory. Darling has written a text that speaks deeply to the violence of silence, of choosing silence, of being silenced. Anyone who has experienced this sort of relationship or actuality in reality may have a difficult time with this read. It brings it all back.

Women and Ghosts is a truly important book, the kind of book I would lovingly give to a female friend, but about which I would say: “This will hurt to read, but read it. Then read it again… Let us then talk and see what we can do to change upcoming history. And let’s make a different history, starting now.”

We Are All July: A Review of Kyle Harvey's July

Sometimes, books have hemispheres. Sometimes, books embody a hemisphere so completely that they become a season, a point on a map, a specific place and a specific time. Kyle Harvey’s July is its own month.

I have this image in my head of a camper van – the tiny kind you’d hitch onto the back of your car – fitted out as a writer’s nook with rows of books and a wooden desk that I think Kyle posted to a Facebook group some time last year. There’s an easy chance it could have been someone else, that I’m conflating the whole thing, but I associate this image with Kyle when I think of him: waking up, starting his day, then strolling out to his office and writing. This is where I imagine July took place.

Firstly and most obviously, July is a beautifully crafted book. The design, layout, and cover in addition to the words are all attributable to Kyle Harvey and printed by Lithic Press. The style is simple. The cover features a map that looks vaguely hemispheric, vaguely solar, in primary colors. The paper has a durable, almost synthetic feel to it, reminiscent of the Field Notes Expedition memo book, which has been sent to the South Pole (wrong hemisphere). One translucent red blank sits on top of the title page for protection and significance, and then we’re in.

Harvey begins, ‘July is the only way in/ &/ the only way out’. July is terminal; it is a journey with a finite beginning and an end: you ‘board & debark/ the ship’. Harvey’s July is deep in a Southern State: ‘July is the map/ of honey in a jar’. It is wet with heat, in spite of its deserts. Harvey’s July is summer, it is encompassing, it has mass. It is obvious by now that Harvey’s July is the July of the northern hemisphere. It is the July of my childhood, the July of denim and mosquito bites, ‘a color/ in the key/ of C’.

This July is very different than my current Julys, here in the southern hemisphere where July lies next to the darkest month of the year. Here, July is wet with rain, July is shadow and mist, July is cold and windy and filled with hibernation. The July of this hemisphere’s poets is not the same as July. But Harvey asks the reader to believe: ‘why not/ July’ and I do; I remember this July and I believe in its existence, for all the po-ets of Charles Olson.

This July I will spend straddling both hemispheres, because ‘July itself does not change—‘and I will take a plane to Los Angeles and spend a week in its northern heat until ‘July/ spills out all around me/ in all directions’ and then I will fly back South because ‘July is me/ as much as/ I am July’ ‘&/ you/ too/ are/ July’, because we are all July.

What Certainty In Reaping: A Review of Kristina Marie Darling's Failure Lyric

In the throes of my divorce a couple years ago, I heard Elizabeth Bishop in an old radio interview pointing out that we humans get divorced all the time. She was answering a question about the damage divorce might inflict on children. My son was 5 at the time and I pulled my car over, trembling, to more safely hear Bishop forecast his fate from her grave. She went on to explain that we are divorced from things constantly—we are divorced from loved ones who die, we are divorced from places we lived, we are divorced from stuffed animals. I thought of the time my son lost his favorite blankey by the Mall in Washington, D.C.

Bishop was saying we are fooling ourselves if we think the dynamics of divorce are somehow discreet from so many other aspects of life that children and the rest of us all have to get used to. Loss is a constant. I extrapolated: what distinguishes divorce may well be all the good that came before it, and the sheer possibility that goodness could go on forever. As opposed to the life cycle that will inevitably cease, love—placed under glass by the act of marriage—might just never end.

Until it does.

Kristina Marie Darling’s Failure Lyric is a certain post-mortem in that regard. A stirring meditation on her own divorce, Darling’s work turns a wintered eye to that dimension of the good that came before. If it’s possible for poetics to be clinical, Darling has done it. And that’s only part of what makes this work remarkable. Far from sentimental, Failure Lyric is artful in its meticulously limited scope. This work does not chart a rise and fall; it doesn’t depict the good times. It does not rage or blame. The only nod to “the way we were” centralizes around conspicuous disaccumulations (remembered references to “his last wife,” her ex’s inattention at ripe moments).

Instead, Darling populates a menagerie of haunting creatures and notions around her varied tracings of the past. A common theme is loss of voice, stopped-up throats. Both bride and groom stutter, cough, clear their throats; “when I saw you again, the trees swallowed their tongues,” “I tried to eat but the (wedding) cake lodged in the hollow space of my throat,” “I tried to kiss you but my mouth was frozen shut.”

Through this image-rich, serial misrecollection, Darling’s work affixes a death mask onto her marriage. Her text offers over and over—with more fervor as we approach the conclusion—“let me tell you a story about marriage.” And indeed she does. By remembering and re-remembering her dress, the cake, waiting at the altar—as a macabre parade towards disaster—these items (broken glass, fire and ice, dead birds that “said nothing“) come together to retrospectively call for the union’s severance, precisely at the site of its high ritual.

Towards the end of my marriage, my ex mostly shot a massive blank. It’s been four years since I moved out, and we talk all the time about practical matters. About the larger impracticality of splitting up after 10 years and a child, however, he just never had much to say for himself. I told him I was leaving and he pretty much said “I thought so.” By then he had developed a tic of saying “I love you” at times when things were most certainly not sweet, forget timely. I knew this meant he wondered if I still loved him. But more than anything it highlighted the fact that he had nothing to say for himself. No sound came out when it really mattered. I don’t remember the last time I told him I loved him, but I surely stopped sooner than I would have, since he made it a cringe-worthy meme.

Nowadays I throw away most pictures I find of our early days. Not because I’m mad, but because they are over, and a preserved fistful is enough.

Darling’s work has its culminating image in [Memento] (Conclusion to [A Garden]) where the author is viewing butterflies pinned under glass, and a docent informs her “the placard can’t be trusted … at the time the glass case was built, the specimen wasn’t quite dead.” It was “not quite dead” (as opposed to “alive”) even upon its glass encasement. This work is about what happens after the glass has been smashed. It dwells in the end-space. By remembering its key moments as already dead, in fascinating variations, the text haunts the marriage itself. I am left convinced that this is not a book about love. It is more properly about death.

So what though? Who cares. What failure?

Let’s be clear that in the hearts and minds of most who have passed through it, “divorce” is a linguistic foil for “failure.” You usually decline to own it by calling it “my divorce,” in the same way as many demure referring to “my cancer.” There’s something definitive about an experience that is so highly personal yet eschews ownership. There is usually no pride involved. You “get” a divorce (much as you “get” cancer). You never “make” a divorce, but you often “go through” one. You pass. It is a space between spaces, a River Styx if you will.

The word “divorce” itself sounds so legalistic, and can’t help but conjure images of Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in War Of The Roses. But what divorce actually feels like, no matter whether you willed it or not, is quite simply, failure. The linguistic “failure” foil is mostly unspoken, though crushingly experienced for anyone up close to it. After signing my final divorce papers with my ex, I broke down sobbing in the corporate courtyard outside. This came as a surprise given how much distance I thought I had gotten from the whole fact of it. No matter how tired I was of dealing with the various debt streams and custody arrangements and microtasks associated with the legal process; no matter how much my loved ones were cheering me on to finish up and how boisterously I was parroting their encouragement and getting it echoed back at me by my ex cum co-parent in the form of chest bumps; I was stunned to find myself walking out of the mediator’s office feeling plain and simple like I had failed. All the student loans and cars, credit cards, family planning and career moves had amounted to this. It was a feeling very different from regret or dreading the future, but sad and painful like full sinuses on an erupted tooth root, electricity to the nerve.

Failure may be beside the point, except to state the obvious about what divorce feels like. In its calculation, Failure Lyric reminded me of this core truth. In spite of its empirical poetics, this is a dead-on work, grounded in deep pain. Darling nails the hypnotic, heart-stopping thrall that awaits you at the end of your (not “any”) marriage.

I’m still not sure if my ex-husband is ok with being divorced. Four years later and he’s as close to getting remarried as I am, he’s as indifferent and supportive towards me as I am towards him (which is to say a lot, on both counts). We are both 100% engaged in the joint endeavor of teaching our son about what’s immortal and what’s finite, how and when to move on from the scene of a crime, and all the ways in which life cannot be a Disney musical.

Was there a moment when it could have been saved? A needle that could have been threaded? One thing my ex did say around the time it was all falling apart was “no one is fighting for us anymore.” It marked his submission to what was inevitably happening, by virtue of the engine of me, what certainty in reaping I was able to muster for once in my life. No one is fighting for us anymore. Maybe if I had answered back, “well why don’t you try?,” that would’ve been the moment. At the time I assumed it meant his various pseudo-Catholic relatives were no longer urging him to make it work; that they had pulled down their anti-sin sails in deference to that larger sin which was me. It was surrender with a stink, so I shut up.

I didn’t care that no one was fighting for us anymore. I wanted it over. But the thought of him settling in with this knowledge almost wrecked me that night- the first we first decided to sleep separately. Knowing he was alone in the guest room with his legs sideways clutching a pillow the way he did whenever I travelled overnight throughout our marriage, I heaved with pain the likes of which I couldn’t survive many times again. It was seeing his utter desolation, taming my heart into beating normally around him as a separate object, which I had abandoned.

Failure Lyric mentions twice the notion of threading the eye of a needle. That if something was to be done, it would need to be precise. In “Prayer,” the author envisions her lost love appearing before her “like a white horse through the eye of a needle.” Precise, and very romantic—as laughably out of place in the surrounding text as a man on a white horse. The second iteration refers to “cities where we lived” as “threads spinning through the eye of a needle” and goes on to illustrate loss of familiarity in the quotidian: “the freeway no longer led to the subway station” (read: your ex is not on a business trip, she has left you; your ex still exists, you just kicked him out of your bed). The reference to lost cities calls forth that faithful Bishop divorce poem “One Art:”

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

One of the last lines of Kristina Marie Darling’s Failure Lyric states starkly, “I’ve travelled only to stop.” Darling’s work itself is a stop. A glottal stop. defined as “a consonant formed by the audible release of the airstream after complete closure of the glottis.”

You must will yourself to write that it isn’t a disaster. But I’m happy Darling paused before she did that. When you are no longer moving, you are afraid you’ve travelled only to stop. You get wrung in by your own ghosts. Darling’s opening to her Preface Erasureasserts what I managed to tell myself that first night alone—“you can’t fight for the dead, only sleep.”