Review by Carole Mertz
Composed around its title’s theme, Braving the Body formed when Editor Callihan addressed the issue of her breast cancer in 2020. After she issued This Strange Garment (Terrapin Books, 2023), she felt the urge to dig deeper into the exigencies of the body. She and co-editors Bao and Franklin immersed themselves in body poems. Following various workshops, ekphrastic experiences, and community sharings, this eclectic and electric collection took birth.
There are many ways to enjoy the anthology. I began haphazardly, selecting first those poets whose works I know or have previously reviewed. My initial readings in Braving the Body pulled me into a deep appreciation of the traumas, dilemmas, and rebirths male and female poets experience and describe within the collection.
For those of you who write, Braving the Body will spur you into new poetic endeavors. Here, so many approaches in evidence, so many ways of igniting a “body” poem! With no divisions or subdivisions, the poems are presented in alpha order by poets’ surnames.
Cleary, for example, begins her poem, “Emergency Room,” loosely-lined and unrhymed, in the urgency of the emergency room and ends with memory of a tour in Rome, while Colburn whose poem “Outside the Sparrows are Awake” listens to “the complications in my heart:” “I who did not know how to love / my own body,” she declares.
Fagan writes a tribute to her hands, and Cooley, relating to her mother’s nightgowns, writes in short prose segments that end with the following:
The fake French café where I have disappeared to write about my mother in Brooklyn is advertising “Bastille Day Specials” and I remember the first Bastille Day in New Orleans in 1976, and how my mother sewed my sister and me can-can dresses: satin and rainbow nylon net to kick up in ruffled layers. All summer, we wore the dresses every day and slept in them, in our twin beds, in our girl bodies, when we were still daughters.
Pollock with his remarkable “All the Possible Bodies,” manages a history of his people (“My mother saw her father cuffed and dragged from the house”) and a reference to unjust police practices (“When you spend 8 minutes & 46 seconds / with your knee / on another man’s neck/”). While Friedland, brave poet, says, “Yes, / this cancer is doing its damndest to kill me,” but ends wisely with “my death is merely theoretical, and life is all I’ll ever know.”
Dunkle sends a self-described “blurry love letter” to her body. Playfully but forcefully, she references Bishop’s “The Fish,” Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening,” after Shelley’s Frankenstein. I appreciate Dunkle’s lines:
Body, let’s be real…
I knew you’d sink back into being a sheath, something to shed—
My poisonous snake.
Vietnamese-American Nguyen, in “After I was Mistaken for the Stripper While Delivering Barbeque to an All-White Bachelorette Party,” writes “there I stood / a bag of meat / head in the crosshairs / unknown terrain.” He describes himself (i.e., his persona) as “the lamb’s wool & the wolf crying beneath thin skin.”
The threat (or persona) in Mary Jo Bang’s “Our Lady of Fire” is arsonist-like. “Flattened by falling timbers,” she writes, “when the arsonist circles back / to see what the damage has done.” Later, the pin she finds “held no hint / of the horrors racing toward me: my name / in ink on a heat-seeking missile sent / from an unseeing heaven, the gods asleep.” These are personal reflections, perhaps metaphorical for a trauma the poet has experienced.
Accomplished poet follows accomplished poet, too many to point to singly; see Dasbach, Olander, Bass, Addonizio, Jacobs, among the 116 poets. Braving the Body includes creations by mothers, fathers, editors, professors, prize-winners, publishers, and more. Reach for this rich volume to refresh your awareness of fellow poets and of your own body’s amazing treasures.
Braving the Body, Callihan, Bao, & Franklin, Editors
Small Harbor Publishing 2024
ISBN 9781957248219
Carole Mertz, author of Color and Line (Kelsay Books), co-edited Issue 8.2 of The Ocotillo Review. Her recent reviews are published in Compulsive Reader, Dreamers Creative Writing, and Heavy Feather, and are forthcoming at Oyster River Pages and World Literature Today. Carole resides with her husband in Parma, OH.