New York, NY: Four Way Books, 2017. 72 pages. $15.95.
Grief is long and recursive. In “The Role of Elegy,” Mary Jo Bang writes, “What is left but this: / The compulsion to tell.” The inexhaustible need to write about the loss, to keep speaking to the loved one, poses its own artistic challenge. How do we reconcile this “compulsion to tell” with an artist’s desire to make it new, especially for a poet who always returns to the psychological landscape of mourning?
Allison Benis White has written three books of poetry, all of them elegiac: Self-Portrait with Crayon (2009), Small Porcelain Head (2013), and most recently, Please Bury Me in This (2017). Her latest book is dedicated to her dead father and “the four women [she] knew who took their lives within a year.” Please Bury Me in This is formally innovative, opening the private space of grief to a wider, social world. It is a series of untitled prose poems, written in double-spaced independent sentences and sentence fragments. In an interview with Electric Literature, White said that this form is intended to evoke “the speaker’s fraught aloneness/weirdness and need to connect/gather.” The gap between sentences allows her to move outside herself, letting in voices other than her own:
Then lightly, in green pencil, animal loneliness.
Unfolding the piece of paper from my purse, I remember nothing.
Only the wind and on the radio a woman searching for her birth mother.
More than anything, she said, I just want to smell her.
Very early in my life, Duras wrote in The Lover, it was too late.
It was too late, I whisper to be close to her.
When I met my mother, she lifted her red hair with one hand to show me it was blonde, like mine, underneath.
The poem is agile with associative leaps. The speaker doesn’t “remember” whether she has written animal loneliness on a piece of paper. What she remembers is “[o]nly the wind and on the radio a woman searching for her birth mother.” In the next two sentences, the woman’s wish to smell her, to be close to her mother, leads to the quote from The Lover, the novel that centers around a troubled mother-daughter relationship. This leap from the speaker to the woman, then to Duras, blurs the line between self and others. For example, when the speaker whispers Duras’s line “it was too late,” it’s not immediately clear whom she is addressing: Is it the woman searching for her birth mother, Duras, or one of the four friends who took their own lives?
This blurring of self and others can suggest intimacy, but it has disturbing implications. In the poem’s final line, the physical resemblance between mother and daughter is intimate, but the way mother lifts her red hair to prove it feels more confrontational than loving. Please Bury Me in This suggests that intimacy is a double-edged sword, as it makes the self more vulnerable to the suffering of others. The book is prefaced with a quote from The New York Times: “Mental illness is not a communicable disease, but there is a strong body of evidence that suicide is still contagious.” White says in her interview that her friends’ deaths happened one after another as if each suicide were triggered by the one before. White enacts this contagion on the page. For example, after she writes, “I want my mouth close to your ear,” this intimate gesture toward “you” leads to an eruption of violence:
Once a woman next to me on a train whispered, If I could just cut my head off and sit here.
I touched my neck, turned toward the view.
Like a string between the body and mind, my hand and neck reflected in the train window overlapping trees.
I see it too: a bouquet of knives where the head should be.
“Cut my head off” recalls Dickinson’s famous statement about poetry (“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry”), which White paraphrased earlier (“the head split, the top physically removed”). Quickly, the intimate act of whispering transfers violence from the woman to the speaker. The body becomes transparent against the train window—it becomes so insubstantial that her head is easily invaded by “a bouquet of knives.”
The suggestion of violence intensifies as White leaps from sentence to sentence without linear narrative. Take the motif of heads and beheadings. It’s through the association of imagery that violence gradually emerges:
I would say a mind made of snow.
I would say aspirin crushed in jelly for a headache, swallowed from a spoon.
Years later, a square of tinfoil and a lighter, the softest howl.
If you asked me what I wanted, I would imagine a ceramic skull, a jar with a moon.
I would say to shatter—to come true.
As we move down the page, the texture of imagery changes from soft to hard to breakable (snow, aspirin crushed in jelly, tinfoil, ceramic skull). Even the final image “a jar with a moon,” which by itself is a beautiful lyric trope, feels threatening in the context of suicide, as it evokes a brain in a topless skull. Toward the end of the book, the head image returns:
Sugar skull, I whisper, what I have known all along.
I am you gone.
Here, contagious suicidal urge surfaces in its enticing form, as a skull made of sugar. “Sugar” also makes the skull more tangible by giving it rough, grainy texture, as though the urge had become more immediate to the speaker.
This imagistic accumulation pushes White’s speaker to the extremity of emotion. In this sense, her poetry combines the associative language of experimental poetry with the psychological intensity of confessional poetry. Emotions that would have been stated directly in the hands of a confessional poet—mourning, loneliness, suicidal urge—are approached more gingerly, as White places one sentence at a time like a heavy weight, her breath withheld.
