Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2020. 88 pages. $16.95.
In the first of two envois that appear in Joshua Rivkin’s Suitor, a speaker defines the word that gives the collection its title:
Suitor, from the Latin secutor,
to follow. I can’t
catch them, or let them go—
In addition to providing a working definition for the term as it will be used throughout the book, these lines establish the underlying tensions that inform the larger project. Here we see characters struggling against each other: the speaker against his mother’s boyfriends, his father, his own lovers. We see the push and pull of past against present in the speaker’s memory against that of his siblings or within the complicated legacy of Fritz Haber, the scientist responsible for world-changing artificial fertilizers as well as the weaponization of chlorine gas. Perhaps most of all though, we see the tension between what language can and cannot do. How it can lapidify or leave behind the things that it describes even as it tries to give them life:
. . . The love poem risks
abandonment, of speaking too soon.
Or too late . . .
This is no love poem.
Rivkin’s speakers are mindful of the responsibility of the utterance and the ethics of aesthetics. They walk carefully around definitions of what is. Repeatedly, we get the sense that these poems make meaning by the textures and characters adjacent to their subjects; they define by negative space. “There’s a poem below this one . . .” the speaker says in the first of two pieces titled “The Suitors,” a catalog of his mother’s lovers. Later: “This isn’t about her, or them.” The speaker does not define his mother; he renders her boyfriends with their dream houses and casual violence and pickup trucks and hackneyed corporate vocabularies. Beside these figures, the speaker learns something of his mother and the nature of masculinity as performance:
His words build themselves around me.
Never be afraid to throw the first punch.
A man should be able to use his hands.
It’s a black-and-blue-world.
The end-stopped lines parody the dogmatic bluster of American manhood. These are the men that learn every name at a cocktail party to feign intimacy because “a man’s name is the sweetest sound to him.” It is easy to imagine the boyfriends at the company picnic or golf course, stepping from late-model Cadillacs imbued with the belief that:
The glass isn’t half empty, or half-full.
The glass is full, and I will break it
on the kitchen floor if you disagree.
To say a thing is to make it true—if that fails, you destroy it. As if language could be substituted for object or experience. The speaker attempts to embrace this model, the faith in the utterance. But later we see him struggle with information that complicates this world view and furthers the tension between what is said and what actually is.
In “The Haber Problem,” the ten-part essay that closes the first section of Suitor, the image of the glass reappears. The speaker’s father “pours two glasses of Jack Daniels and we talk about this hundred-year-old house, its quirks and pleasures. Full glasses, empty glasses. We don’t talk about anything we can’t see or touch.” The vessels are stable whether or not they contain anything. The speaker witnesses this cycle throughout Suitor as he tries and fails to render a character complete. It is clearest in the parallels he draws between his oceanographer father and Haber. Again, readers see an attempt to define a person by adjacent forms, which may or may not share similarities.
For the speaker, Haber invokes a scene from the silent film Battleship Potemkin in which a baby carriage falls down a flight of stairs. The carriage is a freestanding image, devoid of context until the speaker re-watches the film:
I had forgotten that the scene with the baby carriage is also one of massacre. Soldiers dressed all in white march down the stairs firing bullets into the crowd. The baby carriage is let go because the child’s mother has been shot. I’d forgotten too how many stairs they have to descend, all of them, the men with the guns, and the crowd attempting to flee to safety.
The image is not the story—at least not “the whole story” as stated in a later section. Similarly, the father is not perfectly allegorized in Haber, not entirely absent from his family’s lives.
That the carriage, soldiers, and the crowd fleeing them must descend the same stairs says something of the cyclical process Rivkin activates throughout the book. Over and over, we see the speaker attempt to drill into a memory to decipher its meaning. He wants to believe, like his mother’s early boyfriend, that naming a thing can mean understanding it. But we consistently end up with an incomplete picture and need to pivot away from memory-driven narrative structures to the freer forms of the lyric. Both envois are sparser than the poems that proceed them. As is the longer “Coda,” which elaborates upon the book’s basic structure. It starts, “For you, I’ll explain” before presenting a series of dream-like images of the body and objects it encounters. Ultimately, this mode of explanation expresses more of its subjects than the rigorous study of the Haber essay or either of “The Suitors.” It does not reduce its subjects to their facades or performative gestures. We step away from the hypermasculinity of fathers flexing as lifeguards in old photographs. And away from femininity as caricatured in the candy-like image of Amanda Lepore with her “bombshell coif—all shellac and gloss.”
Leaving the attempts at perfect portraits behind, the poems can employ this lyric mode to do the most work with the lightest touch. And though they are less graphic in their depiction of sexuality and the body, they achieve a greater expression of the erotic as Roland Barthes describes it in The Pleasure of the Text. Indeed, Suitors is most alive in “. . . the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing . . . it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance.” Most provocative for readers is not what is revealed so much as what refuses revelation.
In these liminal spaces that appear throughout Suitor, Rivkin’s deft play with image, memory, and form provides readers a fascinating mode of meditation. The book is generous in its vision and openness, and strong in its assertion that all relationships are complex—whether they are with family, time, language, or knowing itself.