Review by Katie Kalisz
In Emily Tuszynska’s debut poetry collection Surfacing, winner of the 2023 Grayson Books Poetry Contest, the speaker traces how a mother constantly self-divides and reemerges, “full of tenderness and dread” (19). The poems move between wonder at the world made new with an infant’s arrival, admiration for ordinary domestic routines, and persistent questions about being whole and living fully despite the way motherhood fragments the self. Dedicated to her three children, “who grew along with this book” and to her parents, Surfacing highlights the compelling beauty in motherhood’s paradoxes.
Each child’s birth is a new world, even at the same time that the speaker’s domestic actions repeat so often that they blend together. Yet the incessant demands of an infant are also a kind of savior for the speaker:
the sharp pull of your need
through the shapeless hours
the thing that keeps me
from drowning. (21)
Later, the world is a silent whole and yet also dispersed in named pieces as the speaker marks how time changes from pregnancy to infanthood in the couplets of “What Vanishes.”
When the boy was new, and nameless,
we inhabited together an unbroken
shimmering realm, hidden beneath
all that cannot be articulated.
Now word by word I’m luring him
into this world that scatters before us. (28)
Children are referenced as “a wilderness” (74) in which the speaker wanders. But the collection is full of suburban images, like in “Saturday” where there are mentions of checking out at a supermarket, sawing deck boards, peeling potatoes, and in “Windows at Twilight” where we see grocery lists and dishwater (47). Likewise, childbirth is a prayer (30) while the child “eviscerate[s]” (34) the speaker.
In these poems, motherhood forces a severing of the self, a division, a literal and figurative splitting into two, most directly addressed in “Expectant” (32). We see the same theme in “Night Waking” where the speaker muses on disconnection across enjambed stanzas:
Only loosely am I connected to my self
which seems to drag far in our wake,
its many desires dwindled to specks
faint as the city stars. (35)
At the same time, the collection foregrounds questions about being complete and present, “living with one’s whole heart” (65). While the speaker pumps breast milk in an office, she considers the scene with her children at home and ponders “how does one fully inhabit one’s life?” (38) She is yet again scattered across separate worlds, where “everything seems impossibly distant / and also unbearably close” (56). Throughout Surfacing, the speaker navigates similar scenes of love unfurling and stretching her to the most taut versions of self.
Readers too will be “bruised / by tenderness” (40) in the aching details that Tuszynska culls from life.
Surfacing by Emily Tuszynska
Grayson Books, 2024, $16.95, paper
9798988818625
Katie Kalisz is a Professor in the English Department at Grand Rapids Community College. Quiet Woman, her first book, was a finalist for the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. She is the recipient of a 2023 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her second book, Flu Season, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She lives in Michigan with her husband and their three children.