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1. Rayfish https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045481 Hickman, Mary, 1979- author. Poems. Selections Rayfish / Mary Hickman. Oakland, California : Omnidawn Publishing, 2017. pages cm PS3608.I2755 A6 2017 ISBN: 9781632430311 (pbk. : alk. paper) 2. This is the homeland https://lccn.loc.gov/2014049979 Hickman, Mary, 1979- Poems. Selections This is the homeland / Mary Hickman. Boise, Idaho : Ahsahta Press, 2015. 64 pages ; 21 cm. PS3608.I2755 A6 2015 ISBN: 9781934103616 (pbk. : alk. paper)1934103616 (pbk. : alk. paper)

• Poetry Foundation Website - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-hickman

  b. 1979
  Mary Hickman was born in Caldwell, Idaho. The daughter of Christian missionaries, Hickman grew up in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. After graduating from high school in Taiwan, she worked as a surgical tech assisting in open-heart surgeries. She earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an MA from the University of Iowa, and a degree in book arts from the University of Iowa Center for the Book. With husband Robert Fernandez, she started Cosa Nostra Editions, a chapbook press. Her first full-length collection is This Is the Homeland (2015), a work of eight sequences written over a ten-year period. Her work also appears in the anthology The Arcadia Project (2012). She currently works for the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

• Academy of American Poets Website - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/mary-hickman

  Mary Hickman was born in Nampa, Idaho, in 1979, and grew up in China and Taiwan. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow.

  Hickman is the author of Rayfish, forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2017 and winner of the 2016 James Laughlin Award, and This Is the Homeland (Ahsahta Press, 2015). About her winning book, Laughlin Award judge Carmen Giménez Smith writes: “Each poem in Mary Hickman’s Rayfish is a scrupulous consideration of how art disturbs, distorts, informs, and shapes our history of engagement with the artificial world. Personal, ekphrastic, and essayistic, these poems are also an incisive contemplation on memory-making and that mechanism’s effect on aesthetics.”

  A visiting professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University, Hickman also teaches in the University of Iowa International Writing Program’s Between the Lines exchange program. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

  Bibliography

  Rayfish (Omnidawn, 2017)
  This Is the Homeland (Ahsahta Press, 2015)

• University of Iowa, International Writing Program Website - https://iwp.uiowa.edu/people/mary-hickman

  Program Assistant, Between the Lines and Fall Residency
  mary-r-hickman@uiowa.edu
  100 Shambaugh House
  Mary HICKMAN is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she received an Iowa Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Boston Review, Colorado Review, jubilat, the PEN American Poetry Series, and elsewhere. She is the author of This Is the Homeland (Ahsahta Press, 2015) and teaches creative writing at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska.

• Late Night Library - http://latenightlibrary.org/mary-hickman-this-is-the-homeland/

  Mary Hickman – This Is the Homeland

  A decade in the making, Mary Hickman’s This Is the Homeland (Ahsahta Press, 2015) feels like a masterful collage, words floating in and out of lines as echoes, ideas, and titles come to the fore and then fade. In every poem sound is at the center, the lyric a persuasive story of desire for wholeness and forgiveness for not just the self, but all of us, as she says:

  Come. Get an elbow, a lovely morning, glory to God, old and secret.

  Heart of my heart, laid at your feet, I’m stony. Today bards must drink.

  The daughter of missionaries, Hickman grew up in Taiwan and China and had a brief career as a surgical assistant for heart surgeries before attending the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her poetic sound borders on invocation and wrestling with the body and its disappointments seem core concerns. Throughout This Is the Homeland she actually, and metaphorically, holds the heart of her subjects in her hand. With poems this evocative, we willingly allow it.

  CLAUDIA F. SAVAGE: You wrote this book over the course of a decade. That’s incredible stamina to stay with these poetic ideas for so long. You’ve said in other interviews that Jack Spicer’s idea of the serial poem or, your summarizing, “poems as rooms that you enter and move through” influenced you. I find this idea fascinating.

  MARY HICKMAN: First of all, thank you for your generous reading of my work! It’s an honor to have the book so thoroughly engaged. Peter Gizzi’s important work collecting, transcribing, and editing Jack Spicer’s Vancouver lectures has been such a gift! My own notions of the serial poem come directly out of the ideas Spicer touches on in these lectures and out of my readings of his books. Spicer is always interested in the physicality of the serial poem, its limits, borders, boundaries, geographies, and topographies, and he tells us that “…you have to go into a serial poem not knowing what the hell you are doing…. You have to be tricked into it. It has to be some path that you’ve never seen before….” (The House That Jack Built, 52). I find this to be the most rewarding way to work. I find it opens new terrain.

  CFS: Your work as a surgical assistant for open heart surgeries comes in and out of these poems and seems a combination of wonder and anger at the body’s weakness. You have many poems that seem disgusted at the body’s fatness, as in the poem, “Territory,” where you say, “I’m so sick of their fat sternums./ Why save ‘em? We are unsure./ See this brain box—which box are we in?” And in the hysterical “Woodchopper:”

  If you have abdominal fat

  & thighs

  thighs! you’ll grow old you’ll grow

  pink in a position we can’t expect

  & force your habit at the waist.

  And, yet, there is a sense of relish in excess as in “Locust II:”

  Bright thighfruit raised & alternate the bounty

  of increase. My desire immense

  domestic, she says. . . Release your glands

  to air.

  Was your intent that level of dichotomy or did it come naturally from your own obsessions?

  MH: I think you’ve nailed it—frustration at the breakdown and helplessness of the body on the one hand and awe in the face of its wonders on the other. I don’t intend a dichotomy, only some kind of utterance, a way to run the scales of what we experience.

  As to my specific uses of the word fat, I hope the poems do activate the cultural implications—the contempt or disgust that often clings to the word. In heart surgeries, my least favorite part was the smell of the burnt fat as we cauterized bleeding. It’s indescribable. And, of course, quadruple bypass patients aren’t usually the healthiest people. But the disgust in that first poem is not disgust with the patients but with my own helplessness. It’s an attempt to be honest about the pain, yes, but also the resentment I began to feel waking up at 2 am for an emergency aortic dissection, working on the patient for hours and hours, knowing it was most likely a lost cause. It doesn’t feel heroic. It feels enraging. These bodies, what are they? Why do they fail so easily?

  CFS: The repetition of the “William” poems and the “Remembering Animals” poems remind me of one of my favorite poets, Yves Bonnefoy. Do you know his “Une Pierre” or “The Stone” poems? He has written dozens of poems with this same title. Bonnefoy has said, “I cannot consider stone without acknowledging that it is unfathomable, and this abyss of fullness, this night sheathed by eternal light, for me exemplifies the real.” Can you speak to that notion of repetition? What is the primary concern in these repeated poems? What are you writing towards or in dialogue with?

  HomelandMH: I suppose I have thought of these poems less in terms of repetition than in terms of correspondence. I wrote the “Remembering Animals” series after my brother-in-law shot himself. He was a very destructive person toward the end but it wasn’t some kind of inherent evil—he was very ill. And the ethics of human relation that I’d been thinking about while reading Akira Lippit’s Electric Animal and Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am as I was writing another series in the book, “Totem,” resurfaced in my trying to work through the grief and anger of this event. The poems each speak to one another—no poem closes itself with epiphany or revelation and won’t even allow for direct sorrow or condemnation. But the poems do want to try to be honest about shame. And this is something that requires a network or web or some other kind of structure to begin to write.

  CFS: These poetic dialogues occur on multiple levels in the book—with prayer, love, sacrifice, and the notion of needing caretaking floating throughout, as in this gorgeous excerpt from, “William Who Lives,” where you say, “Honey stop wrestling honey. I said I’d suckle for you. I said/ I’d Sabbath and scatter the wafers for you.”

  You’ve said that, “Poetry fills in some ways the function of religion for me…. Poetry is the place where you think about what it is to be in the world.” Yet, these religious references fill your book and seem to be your touchstone. Can you talk more about this?

  MH: I’m tempted to think of all my poems as quest narratives. Failed quests, but quests. And you need symbols for these, I think. Icons to engage, to shatter, to rebuild. I’m up for any of it entering the work when it can or when it must.

  CFS: Your spacing and alternating short and long lines enhance the feeling of light and dark, interior and exterior body throughout your book. Some poets have said they write slowly and spaciously in service of certain poems; others talk about performing poetic Ikebana on their work—winnowing and winnowing until the shape reveals itself in both the words and the space between. I know this is an extremely personal question for a poet. What can you share about your form for This Is the Homeland or, maybe, for one of the series within the book?

  MH: I would say that I try to work intuitively as far as the forms go—not so much a conscious construction of light spaces and dark spaces but feeling my way along the poem’s matter to find its seams. Some of these poems were written on the backs of envelopes and the envelope’s edge initially determined the break but later I reworked the breaks by ear. Some were written as large prose blocks and I introduced line breaks later for tension or emphasis. It changes sequence to sequence. I’m never quite sure what the poem needs—I have to try to be receptive to its registers, listen and adjust.

  CFS: Continuing with form, I want to ask you about your early erasure project. Did you know that Yves Bonnefoy’s first book, Traite du Pianiste, was self-published and Shakespeare and Company put it on the table of recommended books next to James Joyce’s Ulysses? No pressure there! I read somewhere that you were a pretty ambitious young poet yourself and came to graduate school with an erasure project of Ulysses. Can you talk about that and how you formulate different projects?

  MH: Ha! Yes, the ambitions of youth. I embarked on the erasure project while I was living in Barcelona. I was involved in a long-distance love affair with another poet and already knew it was doomed. For me, erasure is a scraping away to see the marrow of the text, a rebuilding to bring out what’s already there. But it is also the desire to fully experience and even mark the body of the lover.

  I don’t actually have projects, as strange as that sounds in light of the fact that I work exclusively in series. The series occur. And recur. Poems begin to talk to each other, reflect, refract, and it can take a long time to see these points of correspondence. The erasure project is perhaps the exception in that I was consciously excavating the text day after day but I had no idea what I would find.

  CFS: Reading your work, I was immediately struck by its similarity, for me, sound-wise, to Lisa Jarnot. That playfulness and adeptness in your work is apparent throughout, as in two of my favorite poems, “Gold Lake” and “A Moving Temple.” You write, “Brows of kites of cumin…/ your body coral blue” and:

  …stretch my seven-rhythm breath

  —per what’s electric—a bowstring row of bees—

  Carve your wooden cheek in beams—

  Youthful claps: luster [[]] sheen [[]] patina [[]] gleam [[]]

  Who are your musical poetic influences? Where did you get your phenomenal poetic pitch?

  MH: I do love Lisa Jarnot’s Black Dog Songs so I’m excited about the comparison. I have watched my music change, settle, and then reverse a few times over the past fifteen years. The first real shift I noticed was after reading John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs. I read it the summer I turned twenty. And then the next winter I experienced a shift in my syntax. Bouncy, exclamatory energies. But, I didn’t make the connection until a year or two later when I read Berryman again and thought, oh, wow, this stuff is infectious! Another shift happened when I read Cathy Wagner’s book, Miss America, about a year later. This book taught me how not to be too precious with my language. She smashes language in service of sensation—does violence to the language while always making it do more and better work.

  I would also say that I’ve got Hopkins and Donne in my ear. Spicer, always Spicer. But also Eleni Sikelianos, Cole Swensen, Chelsea Minnis, Ariana Reines, Helen McDonald, and Geoffrey Hill. This is just kind of a short list of my musical greats.

  CFS: That’s an amazing list—Donne, Sikelianos, and Minnis are favorites of mine as well. Berryman’s form and yours deserve a kind of poetic high five. On a completely different topic, as part of an artist-couple myself, I’m always curious how two poets (you and your husband Robert Fernandez) influence each other’s work? Do you read first drafts, compose in the same room, or avoid each other?

  MH: Robert and I met in graduate school, in a booth at Dave’s Fox Head in fact (the writers’ bar in Iowa City where everyone from Vonnegut to Berryman has fallen off a barstool and which was recently featured on Girls). We talked about poetry until dawn. I remember reading his poems the next week in class and thinking, damn, this is what I came here for. So I would describe our artistic relationship as one of inspiration and excitement.

  CFS: Your more recent work uses ekphrasis (reacting and interacting with art) in a kind of prose poem. It is wild stuff—a bit like an essay, a bit like a rant, poetic juice and confession everywhere. Can you talk a bit about these new pieces and what we have to look forward to in your work?

  MH: I think my earlier experiences working in heart surgery continue to influence my writing and I find myself interested in dance practices such as Butoh, sculptors like Eva Hesse, and painters like Lucien Freud and Jenny Saville working at the border between spirit and flesh, figuration and abstraction. So, in my second book, Rayfish, I adopt the rhythms and logics of the artist’s statement in order to interrogate the nature of art, its relationship to vulnerability, mortality, and love. Within the collection, each poem speaks across genres, drawing heavily on the lyric, streaked through with autobiographical elements, and ventriloquizing the conventions of art criticism. Saville says, “If there’s a narrative, I want it in the flesh.”

  Find a copy of This Is the Homeland here.

  Born in Idaho, Mary Hickman’s early life was spent in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan with her missionary parents. She was an open heart surgical assistant before receiving her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and beginning a Ph.D. in English Literary Studies from The University of Iowa. She is the author of two chapbooks, Ecce Animot (Projective Industries, 2012) and How to Be Healthy and Heal (Cosa Nostra Editions, 2011) and the book, This Is the Homeland (Ahsahta Press, 2015). Her second book, Rayfish, is forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2017. Her work has been featured as a Boston Review Poet’s Sampler and in the PEN America Poetry Series. She recently lectured and read in Turkey and Armenia as a delegate with the State Department’s American Writers on Tour program. Hickman is currently finishing a dissertation on 20th-century U.S. poetry and the artist’s book.

  Claudia F. Savage once cooked for people recovering from illness and wrote the chapbook The Last One Eaten: A Maligned Vegetable’s History. A 2015 Pushcart nominee, she’s had poems and interviews most recently in The Denver Quarterly, Water-Stone Review, Iron Horse Review, clade song, Nimrod, Cordella, and Bookslut, and has been awarded grants and residences at Ucross, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Jentel, Hambidge, Brush Creek, and through Portland’s Regional Arts and Culture Council. She is an associate poetry fellow at The Attic Institute and teaches privately. She is also part of the performing, experimental poetry/music duo, Thick in the Throat, Honey, whose first album, Love Letters We Never Sent, was released in 2015. Her greatest passion, besides multidisciplinary collaboration, is helping other mother-artists to keep making work. Her column “Leave the Dishes,” about balancing parenting and writing, can be found at voicecatcher.org and at claudiafsavage.com.

  Posted on: December 28, 2015

Rayfish
264.13 (Mar. 27, 2017): p75.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Rayfish

Mary Hickman. Omnidawn, $17.95 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-1-63243-031-1

Hickman (This Is the Homeland) fluidly melds poetry and prose in a collection crafted with an essayist's narrative certainty and a poet's dreamlike images and nonlinear sense of time. Though many of the James Laughlin Award--winning collection's poems find their starting points in art, they go beyond the ekphrastic, blending together the writer's response to a given work as well as biographical details and interviews about the piece and its artist. The title poem blends the life of the painter Chaim Soutine with the film Jacob's Ladder and quotes from a book on Egyptian Gnostics, but retains narrative control with reminders of the necessary relationship between artist and viewer: "He structures my seeing; he imparts vision. I pamper this slight ghost--I encourage it." The collection also displays a substantial interest in process. In several poems, Hickman draws on her experience as a surgeon's technician. Vivid bodies lie open like Soutine's beef carcasses, the speaker drawing "inspiration from going in to repair flesh that isn't damaged." Hickman remarks: "Part of me would like to make work that's minimal, well organized, clean, quiet, and comprehensible. But hands learn to do things. They have to learn to read." True to her word, Hickman maintains a surgical precision through her work's sinewy twists and turns. (Apr.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Rayfish." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 75. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487928097&it=r&asid=a8a5c2bfa4e02ed18859e7acb9141419. Accessed 26 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A487928097

"Rayfish." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 75. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA487928097&asid=a8a5c2bfa4e02ed18859e7acb9141419. Accessed 26 July 2017.

• Duende
  http://www.duendeliterary.org/book-reviews/2017/6/15/rayfish-mary-hickman
  Word count: 1641

  BETWEEN FLESH AND SHADOW: A REVIEW OF RAYFISH, BY MARY HICKMAN

  June 15, 2017
  OMNIDAWN PUBLISHING, 2017. 80 PGS. ISBN: 978-1-63243-031-1

  by Anita Olivia Koester

  Each poem in Mary Hickman’s James Laughlin Award winning collection, Rayfish, is like a portrait where the subject’s gaze is snared by some shadow just beyond the canvas that is most likely––death, the subject’s eyes blaze with light both internal and external. These are poems soaked in blood, poems that not only contemplate flesh and its weaknesses, but poems that have directly witnessed the cutting open of skin and muscle. Hickman slices, prods, pulls and distorts her lens––the flesh––in order to reveal the alterable interior. Mary Hickman previously assisted in open heart surgeries; the heart for her is not only a concept, a metaphor to hold in the mind, but a thing that has pulsed directly in her hand. The unique intensity of this experience reverberates throughout these poems which pulse loudly and relentlessly in their pursuit of portraiture. Here is a poet who looks to the external world to assist in the mapping of the interior. Throughout these poems, Hickman turns to visual artists as well as sculptors, choreographers, philosophers, and filmmakers, ranging from Andy Warhol to Sally Mann, to aid in her quest for capturing likeness.

  The collection opens with one of the most autobiographical of her poems. The poem describes what feels like the original event–– her first realization that flesh was more vulnerable than she had imagined. As children, Hickman and her brother were playing alone, “carving our names into trunks in the lychee grove. He cuts his hand. The knife slips, slicing his thumb and forefinger,” but in this moment there is not only fear but fascination, as the body reveals more of its internal workings. It seems probable that this was the incident that led Hickman to study medicine, and ultimately to write this book that is steeped in the concerns of the flesh.

  The title of the collection is taken from her poem, “Still Life with Rayfish,” which discusses the early 20th century French painter Chaïm Soutine, and his series of paintings of dead rayfish after Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s painting most often referred to as “The Ray.” The poem, like most of the poems in this collection, verge on essay, and are rooted in art history. They weave in and out of references from various centuries in an effort to suture together a collage-like portraiture. In “Still Life with Rayfish,” the subject is Soutine. Just as Hickman’s poem is commenting on other artists, so does Soutine’s painting of rayfish comment on Chardin himself, “In Still Life with Rayfish Soutine attempts a portrait of Chardin. The ray rises howling from the table its membranous belly shuddering.” Hickman here suggests a kind of resurrection of Chardin within Soutine’s paintings of this same rayfish.
  “Soutine’s eddies in oil capture the ray’s flesh. He structures my seeing; he imparts vision.”
  Hickman is concerned ultimately with the liminal, with the space between life and death, between prose and poetry, between biography and autobiography, and with the destruction and possible resurrection of the flesh. With the finesse of a film director, Hickman opens the poem with a gruesome and unforgettable scene; Soutine drenching a carcass in blood:
  Soutine attempts to keep the color of his first carcasses fresh with buckets of blood. The neighbors hate the stench and the flies but he continues to pour blood over the bodies until he is ordered by the police to stop. Only then does he use formaldehyde. He isn’t preserving the flesh, just refreshing it, maintaining the life-color of the carcass and painting that blood as lush.
  Here Hickman paints the artist at work, in his desperation to capture the colors of the exposed flesh, of skin bruising and bones protruding, Soutine put himself at odds with the outside world as he looks into the flesh attempting to reanimate it. Hickman’s fascination with the rayfish originates with Soutine’s ability to animate and give expression to the dead rayfish. In comparing Chardin’s rayfish with Soutine’s, one sees how Chardin painted the skin of the rayfish–– so luminescent it looks as if it has become angelic–– while the flesh of Soutine’s rayfish is still ruddy, the expression on the face almost comical in its exaggerated agony. The carcass seems to be moving, unfolding perhaps, Hickman points out how wing-like a rayfish’s fins truly are, how poised for flight.

  This liminal space reminds Hickman of the movie Jacob’s Ladder, the protagonist of which is stuck in a place between life and death; his world either an hallucination or an experience of dying. Here is where the abilities of the essayist and the poet are in resemblance, as the poet must wield metaphors in order to bring two unlike images in relationship to one another, so does the essayist pull from a wide variety of sources and yet find common ground. Equating the director of Jacob’s Ladder, Adrian Lyne’s “body horror technique,” with Soutine’s often ghastly manipulations of the flesh, seems oddly fitting. The faces of the ghouls in Jacob’s Ladder in fact resemble the strangely human distortion of Soutine’s rayfish’s face. But Hickman doesn’t stop here, she interjects, as a great classic painter might, a moment of mystery. Using the text, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics, Hickman creates a layer of mysticism. Quotes from this book are imbedded into the poem in italics without being commented on:
  The face moves with alien speed, a filmatic sensation of seizure, fit, possession, mutation. He who has known the world has fallen into the body, and he that has fallen into the body, the world is not worthy of him. The ray’s blank eye and the attending angel’s carved sockets equally terrify. Soutine’s eddies in oil capture the ray’s flesh. He structures my seeing; he imparts vision.
  Hickman is preparing us for her kind of seeing, a multifaceted, many-layered approach to discussing the body, and our experience trapped within it. Here she layers the ray’s eye over the angel’s, Soutine’s eye over her own, she is willing to give up a portion of her own seeing in order to see through all the artist’s eyes she brings into this collection.

  In an interview with her publisher, Hickman explains how the impetus for writing the book was the death of one of her literary heroes, Leslie Scalapino, but also how she was dealing with family tragedy at the time. However she discusses how autobiography doesn’t interest her as much as biography, she states:
  I wouldn’t say autobiography has all that much authority. There will always be counter versions and alternative narratives that are just as valid. And then there’s the propensity to protect oneself and stretch the truth. But there’s a way that, through the artwork, biography can be universalized—it’s a moment when intimacy and the singular cross the threshold into the collective and universal, a space in which the particular can be read across multiple horizons and times.
  And yet these poems are not only biography, we feel the poet’s breath across these pages, her finger prints molded into the clay of each poem that she sculpts, carefully, as if building a house out of flesh. In a reworking of the Lucian Freud quote, Hickman titles a poem about the 17th century Italian painter, Artemisia Gentileschi, “Everything is autobiography and everything is a portrait.” Hickman recognizes that any portrait, any biography, any autobiography is flawed and incomplete as any conversation. And that the artist must respond to their materials, in this poem about Artemisia, Hickman finds herself struggling with the subject, “Through my intimacy with the people I portray, I may have depicted aspects they find intrusive. I have worked to make her appear three-dimensional, rounded. But in this one, done by night under artificial light, the figure looks greenish, bony.” Later in the poem, Artemisia’s “teeming” skin becomes the historical figures she painted, just as Mary Hickman’s skin is glimpsed in the body of Artemisia.
  “Through my intimacy with the people I portray, I may have depicted aspects they find intrusive.”
  I sought out Rayfish because I was writing a chapbook of prose poems that dealt with art history and self-portraiture, but I never imagined I would become so engrossed in Hickman’s web of references. And it must be said that to truly understand the depths of thought inherent in Hickman’s references, the reader must be willing to do a little research, and yet these poems are well worth that effort. Instead of pushing the reader away, the poems in Rayfish draw the reader into the conversation. Because of the way Mary Hickman seamlessly incorporates her sources, often leaving out italics and quotations entirely, the fluidity of these poems left me feeling as if the book had no end. Instead, Rayfish is one part of a larger conversation, and anyone who reads it is invited to participate. In that sense, these poems can be approached the way one might enter an interactive exhibit at a museum. Be ready to play, to engage, to follow the references wherever they might lead. For this is a book about making, it shows us we can build poems out of all kinds of speech, that our own voice can work in conjunction with others, that our own gaze is only one layered upon others, that our flesh itself, our mold, is shared.

• Full Stop
  http://www.full-stop.net/2017/05/15/reviews/galen-beebe/rayfish-mary-hickman/
  Word count: 1198

  May 15, 2017
  Rayfish – Mary Hickman

  by Galen Beebe

  Rayfish cover[Omnidawn; 2017]

  The body is everpresent in Mary Hickman’s Rayfish. There is surgery, the visceral body, the skin, a cross-section, a heart on ice waiting to be transplanted. I think that’s what this book is about. The heart on ice.

  “I draw inspiration from going in to repair flesh that isn’t damaged,” says the speaker. The body doesn’t need to be changed, and yet it is. It isn’t damaged until the surgeon begins. “I’ve assisted in two kinds of plastic surgeries: additions and subtractions. I either supplement the body so that it rounds out and fills or I tuck the body into itself, scraped free of excess fat.” Either way, the body is cut open and altered and then sewn over so, ideally, the viewer won’t notice.

  I say speaker, but this speaker is one of many. The voice is made up of many viewpoints, many centralities, as if parts of a body were speaking from inside another body. It’s rarely clear which voice is which — the artist, a friend, the narrator. The voices, like the works, are roped together like a tree or a fungus or an ocean or a blood transfusion, and the voice is “on the hunt here, following the vine to its root only to find it’s one vine among twelve and we’d better get the shovel.”

  Sometimes the body is damaged. Sometimes the body is dead. Sometimes the surgery is an autopsy, where the flesh is cut open to preserve some living part rather than to fix something that’s not yet broken. On an autopsy table, the body becomes meat — but the body was already meat on the operating table, mid-tummy tuck.

  Death is always close, inevitable. “I have had many near-death experiences, moments when I certainly might have died.” In the ocean, on a cliff, in a hospital. “Once, at Bai Xia, I tried to save a surfer who was drowning. I tried desperately to save him for almost twenty minutes but he didn’t make it.”

  But death, it seems, isn’t final. There isn’t loss or grief or absence. Somehow, the death isn’t in the body. Or the death is entirely in the body and that other thing — call it soul — is nowhere to be found. The body ceases to function, but it doesn’t disappear. It simply changes, slowly, decays and becomes something different. “When the sun extracts the last drop of moisture from the skin, the skin shrinks and forms intricate patterns. When the heat cracks the chest, it draws salt, covering the chest in a fine web of seams. This is what we call contemporary landscape.”

  There’s a space between life and death. The heart on ice. “I never held a warm heart but sometimes wish I had. I think I would have cried more for a warm heart that refused to restart. The cold ones, nesting in sterile ice, never inspired hope of life.” And yet those are the ones we transplant. The cold ones can be warmed again. The warm ones go slowly and permanently cold.

  Transplanting keeps a part from decaying — conserves its original self. Consider, for example, Eva Hesse’s sculptures, several of which, we are told, “have deteriorated. They are no longer their original selves. They cannot be handled or installed as before. Consider a sculpture that, when first made, is softly draped, understated, organic, erotic, like the meninges, the protective tissue just under the skull, and is now a rigid, tawny heap. Maybe what I really want is a round table discussion about conservation.”

  In terms of literary device, these pieces are ekphrastic, a word that means to describe a piece of art. Each poem — disguised as prose, several pages long, in paragraph form — takes a different artwork or artist as its starting point. But though these pieces are born of visual work, they don’t describe it. Description looks at but remains distant from. It’s more like they step into the work, weave themselves with it. These poems are not “about” the art any more than translation is “about” its original. I couldn’t tell you what the originals look like. But I can tell you how they feel.

  A nice thing about poetry is that it’s not categorized as “fiction” or “nonfiction.” But although categorization can be an inane marketing device, it is also, I think, a useful philosophical exercise. I would categorize this book as translation.

  Translation is a process more than a genre. The process of taking something from one language — in this case, visual — and putting it into another — text. It’s a reimagining, an homage. The form is entirely different, perhaps unrecognizable, but the essence is there.

  The book takes its title from Soutine’s Still Life with Rayfish, which is an imitation of Chardin’s Rayfish. It’s “a portrait of Chardin.” Soutine “imprisons the image within the image.” He makes a portrait of the painting. One might call that ekphrasis.

  While I might call Rayfish translation, I don’t think the book wants any category but the one it has. After all, “Nothing takes the place of poetry. It fulfills a particular function. It’s a mirror.”

  Transplanting, mirroring, translation — each conserves some part of the original, even if some other part is lost. The face is gone, but there is the heart. The body is gone, but there is the image. The image is gone, but it’s brought to life again in text.

  In a mirror, one is displaced, removed, transplanted. “If I catch a glimpse of my face reflected in the facets of the paint, in the mirror of your shoulder, I feel myself lost inside the body I see.” The portrait and body are both mirrors here. Both resemble, or reassemble, make the subject into the object. Andy Warhol “only wants to be told about his body by others,” some speaker says. But “people are always calling Andy a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror what is there to see?” If a mirror looks into a mirror, there’s an infinite doubling, an eternal copy in the nonspace of reflection.

  Is a picture of oneself in a mirror autobiography or portrait? “Everything is autobiography and everything is portrait,” Rayfish would tell me. That phrase I just copied down is itself a reflection of Lucien Freud’s title, “Everything is autobiographical and everything is portrait.” It’s the same, almost. Just a slight, nearly imperceptible shift. A little, smoothed over subtraction. Rayfish fits its own mold, describes each artwork and simultaneously, at each point, describes itself.

  Galen Beebe is a writer, multimedia artist, and co-founder of Etc. Gallery. She received her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a contributing writer at the Bello Collective.

• Ploughshares
  http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/review-this-is-the-homeland-by-mary-hickman/
  Word count: 459

  Review: THIS IS THE HOMELAND by Mary Hickman
  Author: Paul Scott Stanfield |
  Jul
  24
  2015
  Posted In Book Reviews, Poetry
  HickmanHomelandThis Is the Homeland
  Mary Hickman
  Ahsahta Press, May 2015
  80 pages
  $18.00

  Buy book

  Mary Hickman’s first volume of poetry begins dazzlingly with “Joseph and Mary,” a poem carved out of Joyce’s Ulysses. Whether this was done by dramatic erasure or by mosaic-like re-arrangement of fragments is hard to say, but however it was accomplished, it enchants. Hickman’s distillation of Joyce’s novel carries a distinct flavor of Stephen Dedalus, a Stephen who has perhaps changed genders, but is still a shape-shifting intelligence in exile, looking for a body it can call home.

  The body may be the homeland named and claimed in the title. Names of the body parts appear frequently—forearms, hips, glands, knees, feet, spine. The poems sometimes invoke yoga (“The Locust,” “Woodchopper”) or chiropractic (“Spinal Twist”) or even the operating table (“Twelve hours his chest / cracked & / died”), but somehow our best efforts to name and claim the body leave an elusive remainder. “This is the homeland,” the final sentence of the first section of “Territory” confidently asserts, but by the end of the second section the poem is asking, “What land is this?” In This Is the Homeland, the body is both the only place we will ever live and a mystifying, unknowable other.

  In the book’s second half, the journey through our exile crosses a rather awful place called William. The poems “William,” “William Who Lives,” and “William My Man” occupy some fifteen pages and seem, like “Joseph and Mary,” decocted from some precursor text, though in this case not a readily identifiable one. Taking a wild leap, one might guess Meredith’s Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod, or some other study of male entitlement and self-absorption: “William named my garden New York City. Then shoved me on my knees.”

  William is not getting the last word, however. “Sky-burnt sea, wrapped in bandages of fog, we heal,” we read in “Totem,” and in “The Pool,” the first-person speaker is clearly not giving up the quest: “I’m here to find out / how to leave with the self.” The book completes itself in “Visionary Elegies” by announcing that it is a completed book, one moreover with a simple and compelling message:

  I am filling your border with letters.
  This is the new word—get up and live.

  As robust an affirmation as any book is likely to earn in these belated days and earn it, Hickman’s haunted, beautiful, and exciting book certainly does.

• Rob Mclennan's Blog
  http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2015/07/mary-hickman-this-is-homeland.html
  Word count: 593

  Monday, July 13, 2015
  Mary Hickman, This is the homeland

  Rub it all over the forearms whitepush then red.
  Sandalwood explains the crane nested in the mountain.
  Her wild hips, jagged beak.

  Body lumps & chest-hole. What land is this? (“Territory”)

  I’m quite taken with the precision of the poems that make up Iowa City poet Mary Hickman’s first trade collection, This is the homeland (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015), a book that “consists of eight poetic sequences written over a ten-year period, begun when she worked as a surgical assistant in open-heart surgeries.” As she writes in the poem “Territory”: “This is the way to the steel table. / This is the homeland.” The press release informs us that:

  The homeland of the title sequence is the body, open upon the steel surgical table; the sequences are linked by an attention to the visceral elements of language and by an exploration of the themes of health, transformation, desire, and identity. Hickman charts the precarious and ecstatic response of consciousness surrendering itself to language and experience, a vertigo in which the self is called back to itself and the world through losing itself. These poems are as much about love as loss, therefore—elegies to times, places, and people whose presences sear and haunt the poems.

  Part of what intrigues about the collection is in the way that the “eight sequences” aren’t set side by side but occasionally weave through and between each other, creating very much a cohesive unit over an assemblage of sequences composed over such an extended period. “My desire immense / domestic, she says.,” she writes, in the poem “The Locust II.” Her poems are scalpel-sharp, insightful, bone-dense, attentive, unapologetically heartfelt, and savagely beautiful. As she writes in the poem “Remembering Animals,” a poem composed after the death of her brother-in-law: “I’d like to think / I could solve the problems of / love lives, libraries, wildlife, / obfuscating / griefs.” Given her professional experiences, one can easily read the meditative aspects of the body throughout, writing a series of questions of the physical body and how it relates to living, identity and death, stretching an intricate and intimate range of concerns relating to, and even separate from, that same body. If Robert Kroetsch once asked, “How do you grow a poet?,” Hickman’s poems, in their own way, might actually be showing exactly how at least one poet came to be, emerged through this first remarkable collection of poems on grief, live and love. Hickman is writing the most intimate of our concerns through poems that expand outward toward all else, writing out basic, human lines of questioning in an entirely original cadence.

  I don’t want my name. He has hidden his own fair name in a clown, in the dark corners of my crown my feet my handkerchief. Your name is strange: Lapwing. You flew, Seabedabbled lapwing, because you know.

  I am anticipating what you have to say. I am asking too much, tired of my voice. Lapwing. The voice that makes love to the seacoast. Or his last written words.

  You are a delusion. You, brought all this way, do you believe?

  Write! Visit! Help me believe. I called on the birds. This will end. I shall be there, laughing into a shattering daylight.

  And scribble nightly, unwed. (“Joseph & Mary”)

  Posted by rob mclennan at 8:31 AM
  Labels: Ahsahta Press, Mary Hickman, Robert Kroetsch

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