Contemporary Authors

• Indictus Noemi Press (Blacksburg, VA), 2018

• Indictus - January 1, 2018 Noemi Press,
• Swan Feast - December 1, 2015 Bloof Books,

• Natalie Eilbert - http://www.natalie-eilbert.com/about/

  Natalie Eilbert is the author of Indictus, winner of Noemi Press's 2016 Poetry Prize, slated for publication in early 2018, as well as the poetry collection, Swan Feast (Bloof Books, 2015). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Granta, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, jubilat, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2016 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at University of Wisconsin–Madison and is the founding editor of The Atlas Review.

• Entropy - https://entropymag.org/natalie-eilbert-in-conversation-with-vi-khi-nao/

  VI KHI NAO: On page 46 of your Indictus, you wrote, “When I examine the memories that broke me, I torture my question.” How do you desire me to interview you? Should I torture your question with my question?

  NATALIE EILBERT: When I first started this book, I wanted to interrogate the memories floating around in my brain. I say float but what I mean is that they crashed into parts of me, they never let me stop wanting their crash. I had this relationship with my memories that hurt to recall, the memory itself a dysfunctional feedback. Nobody has ever asked me consent around this, not my memories or the stuff or persons who produced them. I think that you should absolutely torture my question with your question. It is the only way to fight back against it.

  VKN: The words “memory”, “skin”, “hole”, “rock/stone”, “forgiveness” are words I noticed you revisit with an apoplectic frequency. The way you have used them in your Indictus gave me the impression that they are all words that are synonyms with one another. Do you feel the same way? Or do those words hold stronger distinctions for you?

  NE: I’m glad you caught onto that. I would say that the forgiveness I’m after is more of a hole than a stone, memory is the imprint a rock leaves in the dirt. A hole in many ways speaks not about a void but the opposite—the edges of the hole must exist in order for us to understand that we are about to fall. We know holes only because we are not falling, or, because there is ground beneath us, we assume as much. Forgiveness is like that hole, in that those who require forgiveness have to rely on their guilt to work, the edges upon which the memories function. An apology patrols the hole.

  I wanted, in this collection, for words to ricochet, to intercept and interpolate each other. The language fits the incidents because language is as much a hole as it is the skin around the hole. I relied on these sometimes opposing forces to speak that which I could not.

  VKN: To reference you, on page 33, you wrote, “I compose letters of forgiveness only after a drill sounds.” What do you mean by “drill” sounds. I know the act of drilling creates a hole. Do you mean by that kind of drill? When I think of drill sounds I think of alarm bells in institutions to warn people of a fire or of a pending tornado or hurricane.

  NE: Growing up on Long Island, there was always this clockwork siren that sounded at dusk. I never understood it but it became part of the landscape as a cicada does. The drill or the siren or the chirp matches the grass and the smells. It sets the stage for some good core memories. I wasn’t thinking in that moment of a tornado drill. I wasn’t even thinking of a fire drill, though my house burned down when I was 10. I had this image in my mind of a woman standing over a fresh-drilled hole with her letters. In the letters she has released her abusers. This is fiction, the biggest most blundery-est fiction, because there will never be an opening through which to forgive, because these abusers, I don’t think, will ever have sorrow for what they did. There’s this moment in The Glass Essay by Anne Carson where she imagines herself bereft and standing on a cliff’s edge, the wind blowing through her until the wind scorches off her skin and muscles and eventually, she’s just this standing skeleton awaiting—what?—redemption? Perhaps. I think of that image often. I see me holding letters, gripping them without skin or muscle. Just whatever below me is left.

  VKN: How long did you live in that house before it burned down, Natalie? Do you miss it? Did you lose many important material objects that were dear to you?

  NE: It was my childhood home. I lived there all my life until it burned down when I was ten. I see ten as the cutoff point of my childhood, but I also see it as a fresh start. I had a lot of pain in that house. It could not be melted or turned to soaked sooty damage. The material object I lost that I most valued was a stuffed dalmation dog named Lucky which feels very on the nose. I used to carry around Lucky under my arm so that its stuffed head poked out of my armpit. It was like a ring that leaves an impression in the body when it’s not there. For whatever reason, Lucky was not on me when I fled the house. I must have been that scared. My sense of fear was already challenged. I had already experienced the dissociative effects of abuse and it caused delayed reactions. I had to go to a neighbor’s house. I sat in the backroom while my house burned down watching Lady and the Tramp. I remember sitting there and realizing I didn’t have Lucky. I hyperventilated in my seat but I didn’t move. I didn’t want to be seen by anybody.

  VKN: “INDICTUS,” you wrote on page 11, “points to the unsaid.” Does part of this manuscript point towards or reference Louise Glück? One of the writers whom you read frequently in your youth. You had quoted her in one of your interviews. “The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen.” What moved you about her work? And, what is her work in relation to yours? What part of your manuscript do you desire for it to be “unseen”?

  NE: Louise Glück’s The First Four Books of Poems was the first collection I read in a college setting. I had heretofore been obsessed with Sharon Olds and Sandra Cisneros, but Louise Glück felt like a whole other dimension. I imagined her world as this navy blue painting with white score marks haphazard all around me as I read. There was something about her haunt that made me feel like I too could become my own disguise. I could exist as the I of a poem. The I is so thin and barely there, a line pointing up. I liked how she challenged what the ego could do nestled into its darkness. I felt that she raged in a way I understood. Quietly, with technical grace. Well, I hadn’t yet any technical grace, but I was certain I had the quiet rage down. The idea of the unsaid, as she tells it, was such a manifesto. To “make a whole that does not forfeit its power.” I don’t believe in finished things, or that art is ever really finished. I think that my obsession with holes has a lot to do with that, whether parts of ground collapse or sink, whether something burrows its way into and through another thing, no matter the circumstances, holes make us vulnerable to the fact that we won’t stay whole. A hole that does not forfeit its whole, could be another way I think about the unsaid.

  VKN: What could the ego do nestled into its darkness, Natalie? What did you have in mind? The talent of the ego under the duress of darkness?

  NE: When I share personal stories to others IRL, I have this tendency to look down. I think a lot of us do this. We worry over how confrontation will affect the discourse. After I write something, it makes me sick. It’s like I’ve reared my head up from a dark place and in that brightness, I realize where I am and to whom I’m speaking. With poems I do this. I write and rework an idea, press further into the part of me that wants to run away, to be unseen, and I push seeds under the skin, nestle that life there. Maybe that part of me will quit running away if I can root it down. It’s like I’m antagonizing a sense of agency. There are many faces of trauma, many different kinds of darkness and light, and many actors playing the same part. Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of which I I am. Whether I’m truly myself when I enter into a poem and chase after this other self, or whether I’m with someone at a party voicing a secret into the ground. Either way I’m in duress. I might as well grow a poem out of the fear. Maybe duress is the closest I ever come to the kind of power to which Glück refers.

  VKN: Your award winning book, Indictus, arrives very aptly and very timely. What do you hope your book could achieve as it navigates and helps shape the coeval, explosive conversation of our sexual assault coming out era?

  NE: I keep starting and restarting my thoughts here. Ideally, I want readers of this book to close the book mid-poem and meditate on their difficulties. I want more voices leaving tortured questions, not with an answer, but with crisper questions that work the same way I see language working, amid opposing forces. If the question of what happened is there, then it is also the question of why you must ask what happened. There is the question of why you labor over such questions as you sit with pals over brunch. There is the question of why fabric softener hurts so much. I teach creative writing and I think that students early on in their poems feel this need to be vague in their writing in order for others to relate and interpret widely. I explain to new practitioners that the best way others will relate is if we smell the sourness of a mimosa and the shattering of a tray of dishes and the scent of fabric softener buzzing the occipital nobs until you realize you’re sweating. At first they don’t want to be so specific, but then they are so specific. I want someone to go on a similar journey with my book. I want others to actualize their own events, form the necessary vocabularies that will move them further from this exhausted node. What I want is for survivors to realize—eventually—that they’ve survived.

  VKN: You wrote on page 48, “In Latin, to incubate is to watch jealously.” What kind of things do you wish to incubate in your readers with your poetry collection, Indictus? Besides cellular masses? And, are you happy with how the book is born or formed? If you are unhappy with it, what part would you like to change?

  NE: For a long time, I’ve thought about Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Monument.” At the end, she tells us to watch it closely. While I didn’t like to be seen growing up, I loved to watch. I thought I had great superpowers that enabled me to see more details than others. I could stare at a tiny stream along a hiking trail for hours, counting the tiny creatures flying and scattering around its surface. I scrutinize language with a similar witness. I like turning words around and finding how their roots differ from their current economic function. I suppose what I would incubate in my readers is a curiosity in utterance. How do you speak and what do the bones of that speak mean? When do your memories exist again in the present? How might you watch those memories and the words chosen more closely?

  I don’t know if I’ll ever be happy with this book. I want to be in the room with everyone reading it, pulling the book out of their hands every few minutes and explaining to them why I chose what I chose. I got so tired of my memories, of writing them down. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha wrote in Dictee, “Face to face with memory, it misses.” I think about that often, and even allude to this line in one of my poems. I was up close with memory, rattled by it, holding it by the shins as it dragged me. I remember still in my first creative writing class in college, I wrote a poem that starts, “I still haven’t gotten it right yet.” I was 19 years old and already, I was feeling impatient that I didn’t know how to language my suffering. I have languaged my suffering in this book and I missed. I have languaged my suffering in this book and didn’t get it right. What I did instead was write a book that released me of the burden of either scenario. I missed it. I didn’t get it right. There isn’t any reason to make something correct that was incorrect and criminal in the first place. It’ll stay messy. I think it has to stay messy.

  VKN: Your abstract poetry embedded in realism, in my eyes, is a way of getting it right. The way you construct sentences are very original and so brutally raw that there has to be a right to it, meaning that your absence and its absence are a form of wrongness. As, you wrote so beautifully, “Memory beheld a glimmery data. It/ let grief conjoin and it began, a kind of home/ in its continuum (I misread this as condominium). I can no longer be the woman/ who tells you what solidarity means./ It’s a rock folded over a breathing hole. / And I need no air, only similitude.” Will you give us access to what you mean by “similitude”? It remains vague or foggy in my subsconsciousness despite how beautiful and thought-suggesting it provokes or sounds on the page. And, although you cannot tell what solidarity means, could you tell us what it’s about? Especially in our era of explicit sexual harassment. What is the best way to hold institutions of men and women responsible for the machine of sexual assault they have generated as a species? Do you think? And, is solidarity a way of being accountable and to avoid confusion as you defined in one of your poems that “confusion is a way to deny complicity” (p.52)? What is the best way to avoid confusion? A “Dear Abby” advice column to modern women and men who struggle with speed and chaos?

  NE: It’s a pretty raw moment in the book, this idea of solidarity, this idea of similitude. I had this experience with community that really rattled me. I had been attacked by a few for not reporting something dire that happened between me and another colleague. I didn’t want to do anything about the information but look at it, be that good witness. There were other times where I felt quashed by communities who sported the term solidarity without genuine solidarity in mind, only one kind of solidarity. I apologize here because I am being vague, answering a question about being vague with a vague response. I think that I rely on a level of opacity in order to protect the cowering parts of me that never recovered from being tired of being brave. I needed to exist on something like breathing. I needed to function on something like my reality. In this sense, I think that institutions aren’t the only ones who need accountability. We need to always be engaging the many folds of engagement and confession, including the biases we hold within our communities. Confusion means, literally, with fusion. We are confused because we have fused realities. It points to a difficulty in communicating truth, because sometimes we don’t know what truth even is. We don’t know what happened, if what happened was bad, if we should say something, if they should say something. There’s just no protocol. I don’t know what the best way to avoid this level of confusion is. Perhaps it’s how we view sex at all. I have trouble articulating abuse to my family because there’s always been so much weirdness around sex—like, as a woman I can’t be in a position to make such decisions over my body. This was never said to me, mind you, but it is a subconscious dialectic. I find myself fused to shame over what my body is. I wish we had a better dialogue across institutions and bodies regarding how difficult these matters are. Instead, I choose to move in and out of direct and indirect ideas about the body and the shame of the body. Sometimes I am thinking at large about its writing as praxis and sometimes I am thinking within the events into which I’m writing. I try not to announce if I’m above or below the act.

  VKN: I agree that there is a time for things and allowing humans to be humans is an important aspect of solidarity. I suspect that solidarity is similar to discussing “rapes over pancakes”, yes?

  NE: My favorite food in the world is pancakes. I met my childhood best friend at a diner that boasted the best pancakes on Long Island and we ate pancakes and shared what we couldn’t have shared years prior. I don’t know how it came up but it was a natural transition. One of us put their fork down. She had been at my house when the first abuse happened. I was not with her when hers happened. It did feel like solidarity, in that we confirmed each other’s events. The pancakes continued to be a joy. I see pancakes as my warrior shield now.

  VKN: I also love pancakes and waffles too. I will say that you have great taste in food then! Speaking of favorite, what is your favorite poem from your Indictus?

  NE: This is such a hard question! It changes. Sometimes I hate every single poem in the book and sometimes it exists as a whole glimmering favorite. Right now, I find myself reading a lot from the final sequence in the book, “Liquid Waste.” In general, the energy of that sequenced-out poem feels accurate to my experience of writing the book. I repeat in this section, “Again I chew the cud before I waste beneath myself” and it is such a strange line that overtook me. I was sitting in a bathroom looking at a sign about liquid waste and this line hit me. I didn’t know why. I kept starting the poem on this idea. Again again again. I was reading a lot of Mina Loy and I think she is a really special writer, especially in terms of generating ideas. Mina Loy’s use of the word delirious sort of undergirded that whole experience. I liked the way it moved and flowed as a piece, all the various stories that unfolded as I obsessed over certain shapes and colors within the poem. It’s my favorite piece to read out loud. I stomp my foot sometimes while reading it.

  VKN: I better read that poem out loud right away so that I could have the opportunity to stomp my foot too. And, also, what kind of pancakes did you eat with your childhood friend? I really love strawberry pancakes.

  NE: This is an excellent question. I had blueberry pancakes with a berry compote on the side. Strawberry pancakes are also something godly.

  VKN: You wrote on page 38, “I love men when they let me see myself.” What did you mean by this, Natalie? What do you mean by “see.” I equate seeing with letting someone be.

  NE: I had been in enough relationships with men in which I performed for them, praised them, worshipped them. It was sometimes genuine but often I felt a need to placate, especially if they had abusive tendencies. It was a self-preservation. It was a lie required for survival, or so I thought. There have been a few men in my life who have actually given me a sense of purpose and self-reflection, who chose to praise me without my needing to do a thing in return. It felt disingenuous to write this book in which I purport to destroy men when it’s simply not true that I want to destroy men. I want certain men to disappear into the sun but for the most part, what I want is for men to be allies. But real allies. Not the kind that want cookies for saying they’re allies.

  One more thing about this line is the verb “let.” I had bad experiences with men over the course of one summer. I told someone “I let him do that.” I found I did this often. I let them do XYZ, itself a way to diminish bad behavior into a kind of consent. I use this word a lot too in the book because it’s a word that brings up particular hurt for me. There’s a way, then, in which this line engenders agency with passive allowance. They let me see myself still suggests I am still under their control. Certain individuals emotionally manipulated me so badly that I’m not sure I wouldn’t still let them in. I hope that’s not true but, again, this is a very complicated word for me.

  VKN: The verb “let” seems to connote that the ball is still in men’s court when it comes to women’s volition and her rightful sense of autonomy, not just inside verbs and the language of grammar, yes? I could understand having beef with the word “let.” I would be too. You wrote on page 82, “Captivity is a way for seduction to form a skin.” When you write that when you “auto bio graph” yourself against your skin, do you think this autobiography is the opposite of captivity or an extension of captivity? When you take the skin of grammar into your mouth, what is one taste from it that you despise the most?

  NE: It’s an extension of captivity. The reason I split autobiography into this three-part verbing is that I wanted to elicit the automatic story of women and femmes. I wanted to convey a performance of agency that is not agency at all, as with a whale swimming in captivity in her small pool of ocean. The skin of grammar is a bitter rind, this need to be accurate or satisfying in how you speak of your trauma. Because it is a skin in this book, it is another organ that must function within a larger system. It is not my skin yet. I am not supposed to eat the rind.

  VKN: Your tri-splitting of autobiography is very witty, apt, acute, and it fits the sonic and epidermal narrative of your Indictus. I love it very much. On page 49, you wrote, “Last night I realized the phone never rings in my poems.” If the phone did ring in your poems, would you pick it up? And, if you were to pick it up, what would you say to your poems? Would you ask it to call 911 on your behalf if you were in a state of emergency?

  NE: I imagine the phone ringing in a David Lynchian way. It rings with menace, the hole calling me back. But when I wrote this I was thinking about the New York School and all the people ambulating around in those poems. Nobody hangs out in my poetry, thank god. Nobody calls. I would probably only pick up the phone in my poem if I knew it was the hole communicating what I needed to do next with an image. I would be curious how the hole would deal with the police, as I never had much luck reporting my crimes. I would watch that episode of Law & Order: SVU for sure.

  VKN: On page 11, also, you wrote, “I take these specific men who saw no mind, who lacquered my body with my possessive, giving me only the failure of narrative, sentencing my life to verb —I take these men and I form them into the wound of a line.” What do you consider as a narrative failure? Could you provide us an example of one?

  NE: I consider a narrative failure one in which the story does not explain what happened because it is couched in a memory terrorized by its events. An example of this would be the environment and circumstances that led to my first abuse. I couldn’t ever language my chronology, if it happened before or after my house fire, if in the basement of my original or replica house (they built my new house on the same burnt foundations of the old one, too obvious a metaphor I know), if my childhood friend was over or if she had already gone home, if my brother and his friends were in the room next to mine while it happened or if I made that part up. All of these questions acted to gaslight my own experience, because the memory became vague and less clear when I couldn’t answer them. Trauma is a narrative failure for these reasons, which is why, when I see other writers freely write rape scenes and sexual traumas into their prose with crisp violent clarity, it feels so cheap to me.

  VKN: As you did in your childhood, would you use four sticks of butter to write a poem in a future house, Natalie?

  NE: I would really love to. I would do it now, but I actually have two sticks of butter out in order to bake cookies for my students this week! An award for all the poems I had them write this semester.

Print Marked Items
Indictus
Publishers Weekly.
264.47 (Nov. 20, 2017): p71.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Indictus
Natalie Eilbert. Noemi, $15 trade paper (120p) ISBN 978-1-934819-71-5
In her dizzying second collection, Eilbert (Swan Feast) hypnotically propels readers through the relentless
emotional turmoil experienced by victims of abuse. Her poems address both the natural resistance to and the
inevitable necessity of exploring one's own trauma. Eilbert sets the stage for that process through a
confrontation with the unsaid: "Let me say of language that it is my currency and performs best when it is
stripped of decorum." Her style is genuine, generous, and unlabored, yet enigmatic in places. "You want to
be turned in the dust because/ the dust makes you holy, the dust dries you/ out, the dust dusts your dust as
oceans unto/ oceans as shame unto shame," she writes. "The white lurch of a face is male. See/ how he sees
me as dust dusts the dust, the dust's instructions?" When Eilbert elucidates her abstractions into more
tangible metaphors, her brilliance shines through: "Noise of a club// circles back in like a saccharine
plague./ The sound of man like the fat that hugs the/ plunged sword." Equally wise and perplexing, Eilbert's
poems reflect all the troubling ways "we understand others by breaking them apart." (Jan.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Indictus." Publishers Weekly, 20 Nov. 2017, p. 71. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517262074/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3a240b13.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517262074
Swan Feast
Publishers Weekly.
262.16 (Apr. 20, 2015): p52.
COPYRIGHT 2015 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Swan Feast
Natalie Eilbert. Coconut (SPD, dist.), $15 trade paper (92p) ISBN 978-1-938055-23-2
Eilbert's lush, dense debut collection records a woman's journey to take back sovereignty over her body
from the anorexia that has swallowed it. The poems take a number of forms--including epistles,
epithalamiums, modified sonnets, and discursive free verse--and center on the conjured spirit of the Venus
of Willendorf: a small, limestone figurine of a female with exaggerated features that dates to the Paleolithic
period. The speaker, N, claims, this spirit as her guide through a battle with anorexia, with Venus, V,
presented primarily as an intelligent ("V speaks, this time she says/ The death and life of great American
cities is about I negotiating influences and the impressions of citizens") and proudly voracious woman ("she
wilds/ for nothing but calories and sex"). Yet V has an alter ego that manifests as a shamelessly oversexed
socialite: "I'm in the center of a chemical rainstorm, naked as stone, legs smoother than the mirrors laid
down for the birthday cocaine." The multiple voices swirl like a collision of hot and cold fronts; they
contradict themselves and combat each other in the way that one's own mind operates in seeking a singular
voice of reason to follow. Eilbert's array of referents can be dizzying, but her intoxicating language is sure to
keep readers under her spell. (May)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Swan Feast." Publishers Weekly, 20 Apr. 2015, p. 52. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A411335199/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7ace56fb.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A411335199

• Tourniquet Review
  https://tourniquetreview.com/blog/2018/1/24/sarahvschweig
  Word count: 3357

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
  mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
  che la diritta via era smarrita
  …
  Io non so ben ridir com’ io v’ entrai,
  tanto era pien di sonno in su quel punto
  che la verace via abbandonai ...

  —Dante Alighieri, Inferno

  1.

  That words are “filthy” and yet poetry is redemptive is the provocative contradiction that starts off Indictus, Natalie Eilbert’s second book:

  Words are filthy.
  With themselves.
  With the past.
  …
  Poetry allows me to enter into the afterlife.

  The stated aim of the book is to be heard (“INDICTUS points to the unsaid. / In this way, to indict is to write the unsaid”). Being heard is important here because the book begins in the aftermath of a traumatic, presumably sexual, offense. In response to feeling silenced by our culture’s history of listening to men and women unequally, rather than shouting, Eilbert’s lines use the force of exactitude, aiming to deliberately shirk unnecessary detail and poetic flourishes to allow the essentials of the experience of marginalization to come through: “If I jump around in details, it is because I have willfully refused details in writing … Let me say of language that it is my currency and performs best when it is stripped of decorum.”

  Language conveys truth, lies, and every nuanced claim in between. And so Eilbert takes aim at language, probing it as her currency the only way possible: through language. This self-conscious recourse, where the very act of articulation is questioned and dismantled, is the most interesting element of Indictus. It is a book concerned with how to access truth when we are creatures laden with such “filthy,”—that is, inexact and contingent—language. “Even in the highest form of truth, to access memory is to blunder its event.”

  And yet sometimes the exactitude of self-conscious claims, about particular states of affairs, seems to reel a little out of control. “Man Hole,” the 43-page sequence that starts off the book and comprises its majority, tries to invert traditional metaphors of woman as emptied and man as positing, occasionally collapsing under its own frantic weight. Some moments are powerful for their inventive construction and inquiry (“I don’t write because there’s a problem to be solved. I write because I can’t even tell you the problem. It is like the mathematical axiom of nothing—that to solve anything on the basis of nothing, we must first solve nothing. And there is nothing to be solved.”); others, for their frenzy and self-implication (“Intelligence—/what I mean when I see the pulse/ of a poem and it feels like a man I have to win over./I do. When I win him over, I do not win./He tests me,” and elsewhere, “The old feminist anthology splayed out with my 22-year-old self notes./I thought and I thought and I thought, but could never properly/express my shelves … When I love a man, what I really love is myself when I can’t fuck a man” ). As a whole the poem is more interesting as a demonstration of the speaker’s psyche who feels marginalized and powerless trying to constantly reshape such a presumed state of affairs through narrative, so it bears the marks of such a struggle in sometimes fascinating ways. This is part of the struggle Eilbert wants us to feel.

  I want to be the name men call to scatter their ashes
  I want to be the name
  they can’t close their eyes against.
  How are they taking it? The flesh I made them into, the flesh
  I tear from them to tear myself into myself.
  A grammar of skins: I love them/it hurts me.

  But this world is not conclusion. I pull my history through a valve
  and give it edges, give it holes.
  I love men when they let me see myself.
  A dog learning discipline laps up such pretty pearls.

  My hole is a gentle hole—
  everyone here in my hole is a home in which I toss aesthetics.

  The influence of later Plath here is clear, and even though I occasionally felt that “Man Hole” goes on a bit too long or gets too hyperbolic, given the framework Eilbert makes explicit from the beginning, I can read this lengthiness as part of the point: to show by exhausting the iterations of this frame of mind just how exhausting it is to be unheard or misheard. Her hyperbolic moments feel earned because they are balanced by the exactitude of her questions and axiomatic claims on language as it relates to the self and to itself.

  A kind of counterpart to the obsession of filth and purity in regard to language is filth and purity in regard to the body, which, like language (“Language only explains itself inside. That’s what I’ve come here/to tell you. There is an incision”), is tacitly seen as filthy because it’s somehow bodily:

  …I imagine my breasts
  serrated off my body. The secret gunk below—that is who I must be. Please

  swarm my chatty vulva. Its cranial notes move up my throat
  like the clarinet I dreamed of once that became a complex.

  This is puzzling since the source of this disgust seems deeply important but is never quite clear. If the source of disgust with the body comes from the language-using, reflective intellect that conceives of itself as somehow above the natural, this would be just an elaboration on the traditional (not uninteresting) mind-body dualism that has haunted much art and thought on filthiness and purity, on the bodily and the ideal. But Eilbert seems to paint such disgust as necessarily sourced from men and sexual experiences with them. Of course, this can be and often is the effect of sexual trauma, but to attribute bodily revulsion solely to such trauma seems to perhaps narrow and simplify its cause. The experience of the body as filthy or pure doesn’t necessarily depend on such a traumatic experience—but here it is taken as almost a given fact, which has attached to it a masculine guilty party.

  This is perhaps not surprising since maleness is, generally, all over this book. The word “man” or “men” is repeated 80 times throughout its 106 pages (not to mention “he,” “him,” “his,” “Lord,” “male,” etc.). This starts to feel a bit redundant unless one considers the poetry around such instances, which is often exact, incisive, and deliberate. “Man” or “men” is rendered a common refrain that isn't necessarily literal and accusatory, rather sonic (as repetition is) and symbolic (as any given Other).¹

  But if “men” is necessarily “men” in content, then one might question whether Eilbert is preemptively closing off the audience for Indictus based sheerly on her own personal absolute presupposition that men are aggressors by nature, that women tend to be the aims of that aggression, and no community can ever serve to fully extricate individuals on both sides of the line from this assumed natural fact. Even the second section, “The Men Fall Away,” while holding some of the strongest poems in the book, is littered with this guilty male figure.

  It is obvious that defining something by negation sets up a structure of dependence on what something is not. If poetry is supposed to have the force of deliverance from such structures (as Eilbert appears to believe), then the book seems overly weighed down at times by the very patriarchal inheritance from which it seeks alternative. Even in trying to invert traditional feminine and masculine metaphors, in a sense Eilbert keeps them at the forefront of a reader’s mind as much as she tries to dismantle them.

  It seems obvious that the easiest way to stay dependent on the oppressor is to keep paying attention to him. So we have the choice to either recognize some degree of essential dependence we have on each other as social animals (“For the men to return I must construct a sympathetic brain”) or, if we believe reason can pull us out of sheer naturalism into a different kind of realm, we can liberate ourselves from the oppressor by refusing to recognize him. Indictus occupies the space where this decision has not yet been made. Even in the final poem—one of the most beautiful, I think—, the speaker refuses to come to a conclusion:

  … I hear a voice crackle
  through my phone and I look for a moon,
  a dusted rim. Depression glass on which
  I learn the word SALVAGE in an earlier decade. I have left
  so much of the world behind, one star whispers.
  I await the inevitable figure. He steps over
  limbs with a gift. Darkness like trapped
  rainwater, I thus behold a threshold.
  It is clear what I must do to receive him.
  And the gift in his hand I must open
  my mouth to take.

  This last moment seems to recognize essential dependence on the Other (“the inevitable figure”), but still suggests this dependence sets up a structure of essential subjugation (“what I must do,” “I must open”). She continues to see this essential natural dependence in light of some unrealized alternative, but we’re never clear exactly what that alternative is. As she writes elsewhere, “Even if men have been removed, there is still/ the foundation of men.”

  Perhaps if poetry is our path toward a kind of elevation or perfection, an “afterlife” as Eilbert calls it at the start of the book, it has the same role as religious dogmatism in our discourse—that is, it is a belief in the redemption of individual self-expression that cannot be justified except through itself. Yet, I see no grounds in narrowing this belief to one gender or another. And yet Eilbert, outside the work, seems to continue to insist on such a narrowness, as do some of her reviewers. Indictus is already being hailed by some as a certain kind of survival narrative, morally relevant to our time in its content. At least one reviewer has suggested that if one hasn’t experienced the violence of being a part of a subjugated group, they should read this book so that they might become capable of empathizing.² I am worried that this discourse is not about the book’s artistry but its author’s identity and stance. It is not because Indictus is written by a woman, from a woman’s perspective, that it is worth reading. To reduce it to such a use is to perpetuate rather than transcend a structure of inequality, and more importantly to our purposes here, it is to threaten the very practice of art making itself.

  2.

  Even before I began reading Natalie Eilbert’s Indictus for a possible review I questioned my own motives. I already knew that the brand of ardent feminism Eilbert adopts on her social platforms³ is one with which I, as a skeptic with basic humanist beliefs,⁴ disagree.

  As opposed to Eilbert (or at least what I infer from almost all of her statements on current affairs), I still believe that social practices can be guided by basic universal principles. For instance, I still believe that to treat any group poorly because of historical disparities is more often the source of racism and sexism rather than its antidote. For this reason, I see history as prone to repetition because of such attempted “corrections,” and so I am skeptical of revolutions, especially revolutions that self-consciously conceive of themselves as breaking new ground.⁵ I realize this may be rapidly becoming an unpopular opinion.

  I also firmly believe that the only way to actually effect social change is to be able to have uncomfortable conversations with people who disagree with the way to achieve social change. As I have argued elsewhere, if we are not able to have substantive critical conversations about the form and content of our contemporary narratives, it becomes more of a therapeutic exercise than art submitted for public view, and this tells us something about the effects of identity politics on what gets published in this market-driven system and why.⁶

  If I am dogmatic in my own thinking, it is a dogmatism that, like Eilbert, holds poetry to be capable of being somehow better than ourselves. But I do not take truly good poetry to be possible if it is merely elaborating a predetermined socio-political stance; that poetry can live in and through doubt, questioning, and nuance is one of the things that makes it art. I am left wondering if and how Eilbert realizes this: While the speaker of Indictus for the most part earns her hyperbolic risks, there is another hyperbole operating just slightly outside the work, which I believe is not only unearned but actually does damage to the work itself.

  The trappings of Eilbert’s book threaten to undermine the book’s shrewd elegance. Even Eilbert’s own end material (a lengthy “Notes & Acknowledgments” section as well as a lengthy “Thank You” section) tends to literalize her poetry, pigeonholing it as belonging to the genre of marketable women's poetry on sexual assault, narrowing its universalizing moments into a subgenre, moving from the literary to the literal, offering itself up as catharsis for a particular group of women sexually assaulted by men. There is a sense that there’s a previously agreed-upon narrative where men are bad in virtue of being men and women are good (or even pure) in virtue of being women, which casts my admiration of the book in a doubtful light. My skepticism about hashtag activism in general pulls me out of the poetry of this deeply interesting speaker and back in the region of confronting Eilbert’s own moralizing stances. These moments make me wonder whether Eilbert is perhaps less interested in the nuances and implications of her own poetic work than in using it to further a sociopolitical stance (or brand?). Such a stance, as I understand it, requires that retribution for historical wrongs necessarily involves subjugating the previously advantageous group. This essentially reduces individuals to types and pits these types against one another.⁷

  Take Morgan Parker’s blurb on Indictus, which sets up a particularly risky mutual exclusion: “I will not laud Eilbert for her trauma, her deft vulnerability. Instead, I have removed all of the Homer from my bookshelves, and Dante, and Milton and Holden Caulfield, too. I trashed them all. In their place, Natalie Eilbert’s epic INDICTUS, the only journey of tribulation and discovery that I regard as true heroism.”⁸

  But the worth of Indictus is not mutually exclusive in regard to Homer, Dante, Milton, and Salinger, among others (and Eilbert’s epigraph comes from Anne Carson and bears the positive marks of Carson’s influence—Carson would have no career as a classicist without the canon). I can only understand such a comment by imagining that such thinking holds that men are misogynists by nature, and that the tradition is ridden with their narratives, which are somehow by nature misogynistic narratives that we cannot extricate from misogyny and enjoy or learn from as art. This is disappointing, as it seems to be committing a version of the logical fallacy that conflates terrorism as a property of being Muslim.

  Further, if words are “filthy” and poetry is redemptive, throwing certain poetry away because it is written by people different from us is to limit the possibility of redemption to a select few. This sentiment brings to mind a common historical refrain. Over 100 years before the National Socialist book burnings in the spring of 1933, roughly 500 students gathered to set books on fire on the grounds of Wartburg Castle, associated with revolutionary thinking ever since Luther, 300 years before that, had sought refuge there after his excommunication. They were burning texts that cast doubt on unifying the region’s then-separate states.⁹ Presumably, these students saw themselves as carrying out a rebellion similar to Luther’s against an ideology they saw as harmful for their livelihoods or backward-stepping for what they perceived as the correct course of history. Then, in 1933, another generation of students held rallies in 34 university towns across Germany and gathered books they saw as contrary to the aims of National Socialism just to set them aflame. These students wanted to purify German language and literature by purging it of certain kinds of intellectualism. Some choices for the bonfires were obvious (Marx). Others were books featuring any kind of nuanced descriptions of the realities of war. Others were consumed by flame merely for encouraging human understanding through empathy. These were works by Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, and Helen Keller, among many others.

  3.

  Despite my misgivings—actually, because of them—I decided to go ahead and write this review because I wanted to see if it was possible to discuss—even laud—the form of a work while philosophically disagreeing with the substantive content behind a poetry’s tacit claims. Because I am committed to the idea that philosophy and poetry can be closer than traditionally conceived, because I believe that every work of poetry operates from certain implicit philosophical premises, expressed (however subconsciously) in poetic decisions, I believe a poetic work is capable of being answerable to such criticisms. My claim is that if the work cannot offer sufficient answers to critiques of its own premises, then we must question what the substantive difference is between the artwork and works of advertising, branding, even propaganda. This is, for many reasons, an extremely pressing issue for our time.

  After reading Indictus, I realized that it was absolutely possible to admire such an achievement. It is a book of clarity while also being a book of wild invention—this is deeply hard to balance and Eilbert should be praised for her deftness. And even where the book appears to get tangled up in itself, I don’t feel as though I want to put it down but rather that I want to return to it, to understand the tangles by reentering them.

  Still, my admiration of Eilbert’s poetic work threatens to be polluted if I don’t carefully keep in mind the distinction between speaker and author, something that Eilbert herself makes difficult, and if I don’t ignore those who overstate the worth of Eilbert’s book in respect to the canon, which only unravels the book’s own dedication to language and questions regarding language. If we truly trash the tradition, then the force of Eilbert’s intellect and poetic formulations, which operate by making explicit certain experiences unaddressed by the tradition, would become impotent. To trash them all in favor of Indictus actually doesn't do justice to the worth of Indictus at all.

  People will argue that saying on Twitter that books should be trashed and replaced is not the same thing as striking a match and setting pages on fire. But, given our digitized culture, one that has proven itself to be an ideal condition for outrage to go viral, I wonder what the counterpart to such a sentiment looks like in the 21st Century. The literal form may be different but the intention feels similar: to delete any version of history that might conflict in some way with the new worldview, a worldview presumed to have the privileged moral high ground to objectively survey our past, a worldview presumed to be revolutionary and wholly different. It is to indict and assign guilt swiftly and without trial. Another poet suggested on Twitter that Parker’s blurb was worth blowing up wall-size.¹⁰

• Chicago Review of Books
  https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/01/18/indictus-natalie-eilbert-review/
  Word count: 971

  Natalie Eilbert’s second collection of poems, Indictus, takes its title from the Latin root of “indict.” Indict, as we learn in the book’s opening poem-cum-manifesto—“To Read Poems Is to Follow Another Line to the Afterlife. To Write Is to Wed Life with Afterlife.”—carries with it a strange and forked etymology. Its root, the Latin ‘indictus,’ means to name or declare, as a prosecutor does in court; paradoxically, it also means that which isn’t or can’t be said. In holding close these two contradictory meanings, the word begs us to think of them as entangled—highlighting the way what’s said often works to contain or conceal what isn’t.

  In Indictus, Eilbert takes on this contradiction in the context of recounting the trauma of sexual violence and of trying to come to terms with what robs one of terminology. Indictus, says Eilbert’s speaker, was written to “push language back into the body I could never save,” language that men had pulled “out of my mouth to push themselves in.”

  This pushback takes the form of poems in which reflections on etymology, swaggering reclamations of agency, and images of numbness, abjection, and violence cohabitate—modes that Eilbert moves between rapidly. A two-page section of “Man Hole,” the long poem that takes up much of the book’s first half, begins with a rumination on the word “examination” (“An examination means question but also suggest torture.”) but soon changes shape. It passes through the gruesome (“My friend disembowels a cow in Montana. . . I disembowel the sink.”) and the darkly comic (“. . . I have had dreams in which men are awkward soldiers who need my touch.”). It quotes the poets Anne Boyer and James Tate, and finally ends on a note of constrained yearning (“I called the sun a blunt sun. I just needed my life to begin.”).

  Formally, Indictus is no less wild. Eilbert not only jumps between prose and verse, but frequently writes such long lines that the boundary between the two blurs. “Man Hole” alone shifts rapidly between standalone sentences and long stanzas, clipped lines and paragraphs—often in the span of a single page. Consistent throughout the collection, however, is the sheer audacity of Eilbert’s language—by turns visceral and comic, taut and frenetic. In “Ezekielle,” Eilbert writes,

  “I must

  map a border so we can be the meat in it—but I’ve instead become editorial

  director of prophecy, pulled out the Lord’s curls and tied their tufts to the highest

  fencepost. I’ve produced a popular reality show called How Weak Is Your Moral

  Constitution? and I’ve folded a net over my pursuers to force out apology each

  episode.

  There will be no delay. The days go by and every vision comes to nothing.

  Down the street I am the favored daughter because my fulfillment requires

  no power and no snares. I am the stuff of my idols, they cannot know what it meant

  to lean me over the chair and be so desolate they named the township after my

  shape.”

  Here and throughout Indictus, Eilbert’s speaker swings between supreme agency over a wholly malleable world and mere object, hole, passive receiver. These opposing modes strain against each other and threaten to fly apart. But the rhythmic drive and unrelenting sense of urgency that undergird Eilbert’s poems holds them together, just as centripetal force holds bodies to the walls of a Gravitron—one is afraid to stop reading at the risk of flying off into space.

  This effect is magnified by the way Eilbert strains language at the technical level. Her lines and sentences are frequently dense to the point of dizzying, composed of orbs of parataxis strung together with ‘of’ and ‘and’. Norms of word usage are distorted or simply ignored as nouns perform actions (“I forest myself”), the abstract mixes with the organic (“a dead math”; “an impartiality / of organs”), and verbs are paired with “wrong” prepositions (“seduce…into,” “arch at”). That Eilbert’s sentences generally abide by the rules of English syntax and grammar only heightens the sensation of language under strain. Taken as a whole, the poetics of Indictus is one of unabashed verbal maximalism, and to read it is to feel—quite viscerally—a medium breaking under pressure, showing its seams.

  This aesthetic can’t help but resonate thematically, given that Indictus is less a narrative of trauma than an attempt to crash through narrative’s limitations. Memory and language—essential tools for any recounting of the past—are, for Eilbert’s speaker, fallible, inadequate, and hopelessly compromised: words are “filthy . . . [w]ith themselves…[w]ith the past,” while memory “is an offense to what happened.” Eilbert’s speaker is so deeply bothered by this that they question the legitimacy of the book itself, calling its poems “disaster profiteering” and “cheap devices.” They declare, on the book’s opening page, “I tell a friend I want to delete this whole book so that no one will see it / and he says I should hold onto that feeling.”

  Despite this, Indictus exists. The embarrassment and inadequacy of writing—of trying to say what so resists being said—is outweighed only by its necessity. This sensation, urgent and pervading, holds Indictus together and pushes it onward. Whether or not the need to write toward an adequate truth can be sated, and whether or not a narrative of trauma can arrive at closure, are not questions Indictus claims to answer. But it is a moving and captivating example of how poetry can reveal a way toward one.

• Chicago Review of Books
  https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/01/18/indictus-natalie-eilbert-review-poetry/
  Word count: 986

  Let me say of language that it is my currency and performs best when it is stripped of decorum.” This line from the opening page of Indictus serves as a foretaste as well as a forewarning. Direct, utterly devastating sentences fill this volume with revelation and heft. In her second book, Natalie Eilbert skillfully investigates the violence of trauma in all its resonances, ruthlessly exposing the deep misogyny and rape culture threading through America today.

  It is in that same poem that Eilbert introduces us to the role reversal of male agent and female object. It is made clear from the start that the male you exists as a thing to be made to fulfill her needs. “Made to” means “constructed for the purpose of.” It also means “forced into.” Within these pages, Eilbert says, control is hers.

  I make him hundreds of times, drilling behind his temples to make future exterminations simple. I make his cock hundreds of times. I freeze it mid-revision.

  I make him hundreds of times, let his holes grow dusty from lack of speech.

  I make him hundreds of times and he sits on a rock all bashful and glitz.

  I make him hundreds of times until he is pretty and worth his weight in flesh.

  Eilbert builds you with intention, assembling a language-arsenal to do her bidding. The act of making, the agency of speech, is her power over the object. In her hands, construction is a kind of conscription: the object made to obey cannot revolt, having not been given the means to revolt.

  Her object of desire must—impossibly—be silent and becomingly shy, yet eye-catching with sparkle. Prettiness equals worth in this equation, an idea doubly underlined by the flesh that unexpectedly takes the place of gold in the familiar idiom. The invocation of flesh also calls to mind The Merchant of Venice, in which a cross-dressed Portia appears in court to save Antonio from losing his life to pay Shylock the promised pound of flesh. Hers is a victory no one else could have won, yet it hinged on circumvention of the misogynist social framework.

  In Eilbert’s workshop, the male you is the object of creation and of utility. “I thou him so hard I feel his fingers wrapping their worth round my neck.” If he does not want to be treated thus, why does he not say no? the poems rhetorically ask. Why do you not say no, after I have sewn shut your mouth, after I have fashioned you mute with my words, with my power? In these poems, Natalie Eilbert enacts a visceral dynamic. Within these pages, a lack of control is imposed upon you, the reader. It is not a comfortable book to read; the truth is rarely comfortable.

  To call a woman a hole is to suggest immediate use.
  To call a man a hole suggests grave incivility—

  incivilities I place like a knife at the windowsill.

  Eilbert not only addresses the violence implicit in social constructs, she often pulls apart words themselves, bringing their etymology to light. She wants to understand them, to understand what we mean when we say them, though we may not know it, by understanding what they once meant. “We understand others by breaking them apart… a seed blooms from the rapture of seed, see it?” The words hold secret meanings.

  The lives chronicled in these pages stand in for all who must exist in cultures of injustice and violence. It is not beautiful but it is true. Silence itself bears examination, just as rape can be committed in the absence of a no. Eilbert writes, “We ignore vacancy when its convenience leads to pleasure.” Indeed, it is made clear in these pages he has been stripped of language. It is impossible to refuse consent or even shape the narrative: “He digs a hole in the ground and climbs in / and this makes him mine forever.” Possession is a form of power; silence is a terrible sentence.

  It is a form of oppression. Ignoring, discounting, disregarding a group is subjugation of that group. American rape culture, supported at the highest levels of government, perpetuates a state of tyranny over women. This is not an overstatement.* The status quo is oppressive. There are some among us who have not yet personally experienced this destructive a powerlessness; this is a book for them to read.

  In the courtroom scene of The Merchant of Venice, Portia gives a famous speech on the quality of mercy, begging Shylock to take pity on Antonio. When he refuses, she unleashes her legal argument against him: he is a Jew, not a citizen. When his inferior social status is made clear, his contract with Antonio is considered tantamount to attempted slaughter. In short, Portia saves her husband by pointing out that their opponent is from a minority group.

  “In a world without men there is no need for mercy.” For Eilbert, the time for mercy has passed. Cleverness and blame are not an acceptable solution. The system itself must be burned to the ground. And so, she writes, “I wrote // like I was waiting… I saw I was ready to make use of loss”. Eilbert carefully explores the valences of power and the function of memory, breaking apart her subject again and again like a bloody geode. This is a book comprised of its own process of creation, teeming and effortful.

  Indictus is a tour de force. Its anger is unafraid; it owes us nothing and refuses to apologize; it is a chronicle and an agent. Eilbert tempers her words for no one; she too has a truth, and has unmade your mouth so you might listen.

• rob mclennan's blog
  http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2018/01/natalie-eilbert-indictus.html
  Word count: 812

  I tell a friend I want to delete this whole book so that no one will see it
  and he says I should hold onto that feeling (“To Read Pomes Is to Follow Another Line to the Afterlife. / To Write Them Is to Wed Life with Afterlife.”)

  Brooklyn poet and editor Natalie Eilbert’s latest poetry collection is Indictus (Las Cruces, NM: Noemi Press, 2018), winner of the 2016 Noemi Poetry Contest, and a follow-up to her Swan Feast (Bloof Books 2015) [see my review of such here]. In a book constructed via poetry, fiction and non-fiction, Eilbert writes on the brutality and messiness of trauma, the body and consent. On the back cover, Indictus is described by Morgan Parker (among others) in glowing terms, including that “One could say this is a book of poetry by a woman who has endured unspeakable trauma and lived to bear its witness. One could also say, this book is an incredible document of survival.” “Indictus,” of course, is Latin, the masculine of the feminine “indicta” and neutral “indictum,” meaning, variantly, “declared, proclaimed, published, announced, having been declared” and/or “appointed, fixed, named, having been appointed.”

  Nothing happened. The alcohol shone
  over the night. I cried once. A woman approached me
  and said as much. A seam ripped.
  many seams ripped. A hole leaked
  from my hole, spilling decadent oils.

  My mind is quick to spoil. I am like the rock thrown
  in my uncle’s grave. I land without ceremony or miracle
  with the other dirts. My diets. My flesh thins
  around perception’s hegemonic mutations.
  I bury data inside me, birth information.

  A rock beneath my feet glows new rhetoric—
  I am golem I am clay I am
  the breath of my own shitty god.

  To believe what was done to me is curable,
  assumes a shape. This assumes
  what was done to me is truly done. (“Man Hole”)

  In an interview conducted by Megan Giddings and posted at SmokeLong Quarterly in 2016, Eilbert speaks to some of her approach to, and advice on, among other things, writing:

  For women, it isn’t enough to have an idea about our objective space, because our objective space has always been one imposed on our bodies. We watch brown bodies shot dead and raped in the streets and some artists have the gall to say this is poetry of witness, but it is yet one more way to remove the person from the idea, to say that their pain is a concept from which to move an artistic and/or rhetorical direction. My advice is to reconsider what balance means because, likely, that balance needs to be toppled. You might need to slip on the spill to know the bucket’s been kicked on its side. And when that happens, split lipped and swearing, can you really take your pain of emotional experience to a greater vision. But then you must trouble that vision. You need to let yourself be messy and then neat and then you need to piss on those satin sheets.

  Constructed as groupings/suites of individual poems as well as longer sequences, Indictus exists as a book-length long poem on the violence done to women and women’s bodies, exploring the pieces as they are collected and reassembled, and how they got there in the first place. The poems in Indictus are intimate, raw and emotionally bare, and allow nothing and no-one off the hook, naming names and demanding acknowledgment, penance and, occasionally, retribution. Eilbert writes with a barely-contained rage, one carefully and craftfully harnessed and directed before released at full force. If you think these are poems of unravelling, you are reading it wrong.

  Indictus

  I read yesterday that crimes are committed at a higher frequency during hotter temperature spikes. What was the language of my first crime? First, it was the house where I was born. I never dreamed. I never remember dreaming. This is not where it begins. Whenever I said I was up to nothing, my mother knew the opposite was true. She didn’t know what the opposite might mean. I smeared four sticks of butter all over my bedroom wall in secret and she knocked on my door. What are you doing / Nothing. For years I found yellow knobs on my wall and then the house was gone by way of fire. We watched the inferno from the neighbor’s driveway. This was years after that same neighbor removed my language—or it was only a year? Who is counting all the little footsteps toward error? When I sweat I am a half-species begging my body to stay alive, just a little bit longer.

• East Bay Review
  http://theeastbayreview.com/review-indictus-by-natalie-eilbert/
  Word count: 1114

  [I hesitate to foreground myself but want to provide a brief disclaimer: As a reader and survivor of sexual violence, those two parts of myself rarely intersect, and when they do, it’s likely due to an author’s harmful blundering instead of their careful engagement. This book is one the few that does the hard work of dwelling in those dark, sticky places, and so, it isn’t something to approach casually or without forethought. I read it over several weeks, putting it down frequently to catch my breath. What Eilbert does in these pages is remarkable, and I wish there was a better word for it than brave, but I did feel her being brave on my behalf, excavating and confronting specific personal violence, and in so doing, showing readers that this confrontation is both possible and necessary. So, fellow survivors, approach this book with all possible care and gentleness toward yourself, but please, do approach—you need it.]

  Indictus is breathless, urgent, and unmistakably contemporary. Although, it’s not so much “contemporary” as from the future its speaker calls into being, a time when all things that must be said can be, and we don’t stop others or ourselves from saying them. There’s such intimacy here—a girl telling you something terrible, so unbelievable that it can’t be spoken above a whisper. But, instead, imagine the girl screaming that terrible truth at the top of her lungs, in front of the whole school, and you’ll have a sense of the thrill and unease this book inspires.

  The long poem “Man Hole” that comprises the first half of the book frames the speaker’s history of sexual violence, and that of the other women in her life, as a study of holes—what they are; what goes into them; what comes out. As the speaker observes, “True emptiness doesn’t exist on the planet—isn’t that something? Holes / are essayistic then,” and “The beauty of holes is that I cannot enter one without ceasing to / exist in the outside world.” This framing transforms the violence described and its consequences into something primal and mythic. But there are no ancient gods or fates here, just a cultural system of misogynistic oppression that robs sexually violent acts of their specific harm, making them appear to be without cause, and thus, inevitable: “no one speaks of girls’ bodies as anything but accident . . . The van doors slam, the men disappear,” and the gutting sentiment, “They called her fine.”

  She also examines how women whose violations are deemed both nonexistent and inescapable continue to limp into the future: “To believe what was done to me is curable / assumes a shape. This assumes / what was done to me is truly done.” Sometimes moving forward involves the all-too-familiar state of repression: “Do I remember when he brought my face to his sheets and demanded / I smell what I made? I do not and I loved it. I pushed a disk over memory / so I could breathe freely over it.” (That made me gasp.) Other times, it’s merely a matter of survival: “Dumb little smart girl / walks with both hands against her thighs. Others cover their asses with books. / Women hurt themselves to turn their wars inward.”

  Eilbert excels at representing the cyclical nature of trauma, how survivors live with the paradox of their experiences meaning both nothing and everything, how they’ve changed profoundly and yet outwardly remain the same person: “Years and years went by like this. My childhood was decent. / Years and years went by like this. My childhood was decent. / And yet.”

  For me, being seen in lines like the following was like a gulp of air after drowning for decades: “I grew up disappearing into a body. Then several. I want to tell you what happened to me . . . But what should I say?” Beneath the final line of “Man Hole,” I scrawled: “I’m dead.” Looking back at it now, I think I meant that Eilbert took me to the very edge of what I could bear, shredded society’s understandings of sexual trauma and women’s bodies, and assembled something entirely new from the scraps. I wrote “dead,” when what I meant was “reborn.”

  The book’s second half, comprises the sections “The Men Fall Away” and “Liquid Waste: A Postscript,” is by no means a reprieve from the intensity of “Man Hole”; however, in “The Men Fall Away,” Eilbert’s speaker turns inward, foregrounding her own emotional terrain instead of those who intruded upon it. In poems like “Genesis,” she reflects:

  a man led a girl into a closet and bit down.
  Her cat escaped his leg when he left. It isn’t
  much of a story. It never became a story at all.

  There’s such canniness toward linear narrative and how trauma remakes the brain to subvert that narrative, as in this unbearable section from “In Truth I Wish Him Harm”:

  Then the man removes her pants and tells her to watch the television.
  It radiates blue light.
  …………………………….
  The girl develops a paralyzing fear of dark blue storm clouds.
  She misses her bus.
  Years later she will write with the deep worry it was only the color she saw.
  No man.

  There are numerous other standouts in “The Men Fall Away,” including “Testament with Water under the Bridge,” “Judges,” which contains the breathtaking line, “How I’ve gnawed the rims of cups. My desire to forget / left me a cast-iron mouth,” and “World’s Tiniest Violin,” with the line “my small wrists that are still so small,” the brutality of which I keep returning to. “Liquid Waste: A Postscript” also has many bright spots, such as, “To forgive, I poured milk in a saucer for a creature that never came.” There’s no clean resolution here, no tidy bow to tie it all up with, just a dogged keeping on.

  This is a book that returns the reader’s gaze (whether they’ve suffered sexual violence, perpetrated it, or simply been forged by our misogynistic culture), so it can’t help but be a deeply personal book to encounter. As Eilbert’s speaker states in the final section, “I was born with black eyes / open, meaning I peeled back and stared through vaginal light.” Eilbert doesn’t spare herself or her readers, and I’m so grateful for that. Both timely and timeless, this howl of truth will echo for years to come.

• FIVE:2:ONE
  http://five2onemagazine.com/litstyle-double-reviews-indictus-natalie-eilbert-scar-scar-off-jennifer-maritza-mccauley/
  Word count: 2494

  Rape is knowledge but not the sort that does you, or anyone else, any good. When I was raped, I learned things about myself and the world I live in that it would have been better never to know. And for most of my adult life, the knowledge has been killing me. Raymond Douglas, On Being Raped

  I have been in recovery for almost ten years now. Recovery, by this definition, is the timeframe after revealing my secret: I was a victim of child sexual abuse. It happened five times over the course of a three year period and each time, the perpetrator was a little more daring, both in place and in action. The last time it happened was underneath a kiosk in a prominent New York City museum; the kiosk was in front of the exhibit for dinosaurs and their fossilized remains. In the briefest of definitions, a fossil is created when a plant, or in this case animal, dies in a watery environment and is buried under mud and then the mud hardens to the point of being stone-like. Similarly, as a coping device, the brain buries memories under scar tissue until a point in time when the individual can no longer hold it inside him or her. I have been in recovery for almost ten years now. I was seventeen when I could no longer hold it inside me.

  As a victim, I held on to physical objects of my past thinking it would bring back positive childhood thoughts. Childhood books, old video games, a beat-up VHS tape of The Jungle Book. I held onto the idea of my abuser before he abused me; his smile, his gentleness. And so, in holding on, I was often hit clear and hard in my chest. There would never be another Before and my teenaged brain learning how to recover couldn’t accept that. In fact, this revelation is something I have only recently tried to put into words. I remember reading Christopher Lasch’s The Minimal Self (W.W. Norton, 1984) and was struck by the following line: “The first lesson survivors have to master is letting go.” I read that about six years ago and, in the quiet of my community college library, I wept. To me, it was another responsibility forced upon victims which I dreaded. I remember saying out loud: Don’t we already do enough? Is it not enough to live, or try to live, through this inhumane, unexplainable act? And so, the entanglement of these memories, among so many others, leaves me wanting to understand two things more than ever: Why does abuse happen? And how do we survive with the knowledge we were abused and people who abuse are out there?

  The answers to these questions are difficult. And, like fossils and scars, take time to develop. Perhaps the answers will always be in a state of development or subject to change. I am drawn to a poem Granta published a couple years ago by memoirist and fiction writer Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. The poem, titled “A Description of the Architectual Impact of my Home, Age 7” closes with “…but most often/ I am simply between/and in this way I learn to live either above/or beneath the moments of my life/but never within them.” To be within something, is to be inside or enclosed by a place, area, object, person, or mind. If that’s the case, I understand the individuals who state writing should not be therapeutic, the individuals who believe there needs to be a level of distance between the Writer and the Writing. But if we read authors, particularly poets, in firm rootedness that the I of the poems is always the eye of the writer, for lack of a better term, it can get complicated. As a result, trauma writing might always be in a state of within, but the trauma writer can grow and develop and heal, and with time, therapy and care, move beyond the state of within. This makes the writing raw; it makes the writer tender with all of its intended definitions: vulnerable, gentle, painful at the touch. All this to lead-up to my intended books of review—Indictus by Natalie Eilbert (Noemi Press, 2018) and Scar On/Scar Off by Jennifer Maritza McCauley (Stalking Horse Press, 2017). These two books blur the lines of survivalhood and victimhood, recovery and healing, woman-ness and human-ness. And so, because of these and other blurrings, I find myself within these books and within them I will remain for a long, long time.

  Indictus is a more than a book, it “…points towards my [Eilbert’s] history of trauma, as an object bound not by grief and terror but by paper and glue.” In Eilbert’s Thank You section, which reads poetically in its own way, she reminds again of the success of her book: the strength of process. The sentiment resonates with me the most came when she discusses her family, she writes: “I would like for us to be able to one day talk about this book. But not yet.” In this sentence, Eilbert reveals her humanity and her processing of the magnitude of her book. For me reading this, it was refreshing, it was not dismissive or cruel, and it was her way of acknowledging the book’s heaviness but expressing her desire to one day work together. Not only do I find that admirable but also wholly relatable. Turning the focus to the poems, I couldn’t help but think of Raymond Douglas’ line regarding rape as knowledge and, in reading; I was thankful, hopeful, and tearful.

  The collection has a dagger of an opening before turning to a long poem (“Man Hole”) and closing with two poems and various subsets within them. The first poem, “To Read Poems Is to Follow Another Line to the Afterlife. To Write Them Is to Wed Life with Afterlife”, opens “Words are filthy./With themselves./With the past.” The lines, followed by periods, allow the ideas to stay with the readers and the readers to stay with the ideas. Having “To Read Poems…” as the opening poem, the speaker provides details of her violations, reasonings behind the title of the book, and ideas on memory. The last of which provides a line which stayed with me through the course of my reading: “Even in the highest form of truth, to access memory is to blunder its event.” In turn, this line reminded me of Joanna C. Valente’s forward to A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2017) where they write: “No one is perfect—which means we can’t expect our survivors to be perfect humans either—and disbelieve someone’s story just because we don’t like them or know them. There is no ‘perfect’ survivor.” Eilbert’s writing is wholly and pulsingly human which is why I admire it so fiercely. This is, in my opinion, best exemplified in the long poem of the book titled “Man Hole”.

  Once again, Eilbert writes stunning first lines: “I left him unfinished. I just wanted to.” This poem also uses the strength of white space on the page to create hauntingly powerful ideas which starts with the second page of the poem where she writes: “He digs a hole in the ground and climbs in and this makes him mine forever.” After this line there is about a ¾ blank page which allows the line to sink into the reader and the reader to sink into the line. The poem, and collection as a whole, concerns itself with this immersion: of language, of trauma, of viscerality. The immersion is designed to reflect the weight carried by survivors, even though the speaker of “Man Hole” states “In existing in this life, I have survived nothing.” And so once again, the question is posed; Where does survivalhood begin and victimhood end? While that answer may have parallels in the community, as with the Valente quote above, there is no perfect survivor, which brings me to Eilbert’s shining moment.

  Almost halfway through “Man Hole” Natalie Eilbert executes the strongest ideas because it exemplifies the process(ing) of trauma, she writes:

  To believe what was done to me is curable,
  assumes a shape. This assumes
  what was done to me is truly done.

  …

  But this world is not conclusion. I pull my history through a valve
  and give it edges, give it holes.
  I love men when they let me see myself.
  A dog learning discipline laps up such pretty pearls.

  This assumes what was done to me is truly done. Reading this line, I was (and still am) caught in the web of event, emotion, fossilization, and scarring. But this world is not conclusion leaves me trying to get out of that web and it is messy and complicated. It is recovery. Furthering that, the idea of pulling something through a valve has multiple meanings: in production, a valve is what controls the output of whatever’s being manufactured, and in music, it is what alters the pitch. This dualing meaning creates multiplicity and fascinates me greatly but leaves me gasping for breath at the stanza’s close. That skill is one of Eilbert’s best: just as you think you can’t be hit more, the writing hits harder and more direct, reflecting the impact trauma has over victims and survivors. In a similar vein, Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s debut hits hard and often as it finds its voice through healing and the recovery of self.

  I first discovered McCauley’s work in A Shadow Map and was mystified by the deftness and the precision of her language. Similarly, her debut collection is profound in language and voice as it thrives on the intersectionality of place, person, healing, and pain. The collection is divided into three sections I, We, and Us and is graced with epigraphs by Rosa Parks and Monica Hand, the second a poet who spent time in Columbia, Missouri where McCauley is getting her PhD in Creative Writing. Hand returns in multiple poems like a dear friend rather than a looming shadow which provides gentleness amidst the rough nature of the narrative McCauley constructs. As blurb writer Allison Joseph remarks, “The truth this poet reveals are not pretty, but she handles them with an earned grace, a street-tested vibe” and I find that quite right. Quite right indeed.

  One of the first poems in the book is titled “When Trying to Return Home” and I’d like to start there. The poem recalls an interaction between the speaker and “a Miami browngirl” and the poem concerns itself with origins and family. The speaker reveals she “…was born/where my culture rarely bloomed—amongst Northern steel-dust and/dead skies”. By opening up and revealing this information, the speaker of the poem is still in-quest for belonging. Furthermore, the speaker even admits wanting to say the following to the girl:

  …I would love to be the type of girl
  that says soy de Somewhere and everyone says “Girl, I see”
  or “you’re una de las nuestras”
  or “you belong.”

  This desire for belonging takes precedent in the collection which is fiercely admirable but also fiercely vulnerable. The poem continues with the speaker’s longing to connect with not only this girl, but the reader, which makes the poem’s close all the more haunting:

  I want to tell the browngirl this while she turns and walks off.
  I want to tell her that when she came to me, thinking I was hers
  in that moment we were together,

  at least.

  And similarly to certain sections in Eilbert’s “Man Hole” McCauley is able to wield the power of blank space on the page which is thoughtful and calculated. It really hones in distance in all senses of the word furthering why this collection rivals Indictus; they both are open and wide-stretching, searching lands of recovery and pain, but also of self and womanhood.

  As mentioned earlier Scar On/Scar Off is divided into three sections and the second section of the book provides a multitude of prose poems and offers one of McCauley’s strongest lines of the book: “I am a rebel language”. Briefly considering the word rebel—the noun is a person who protests authority, the verb is the act of protesting—and McCauley’s collection embodies rebellion as a means of connection. When an individual is sexually assaulted, the brain and body rebels against the action as a coping mechanism. When your brain rebels against memory that is when the burying of events occurs. The poem that embodies this ideology lies near the end of McCauley’s book and it is called “Nothing Ain’t History” which connects popular culture with the speaker’s view of recovery and survivalhood.

  The poem offers the readers insight into 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) which is a film with John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead though the girl is never mentioned. This decision by the speaker allows the girl to become universal. The film’s plot is explained briefly and provided necessary context while also hinting at its own disturbing truths, McCauley writes “…He (Goodman) tells her/she should be grateful he has saved her, but/she is suddenly afraid of being alive.” It is, at this point of the poem, where the name John Goodman went beyond the name of the actor to reflect intentions of John Anyman. Even though the girl is saved, she is still not safe. And that reflects the problematic nature of victimhood and survivalhood and where those lines continue to constantly be blurred. To this idea, the poem provides personal truths shared by the speaker, the lack of comfort felt when the speaker hears the following:

  hey beautifulwhereyougoinI’llfollowyouforsafety. In that action, even if it was meant with the most sincere of intentions, is still threatening to the speaker and, universally speaking, women everywhere. This is magnified by the fact that McCauley and Eilbert both are sharing their stories and narratives of healing and trauma. The poem’s ending seems a fitting place to end:

  Here is the ending:
  There is no proper ending.
  You don’t see if the girl survives or not, you just know
  she is somewhere driving and running,
  driving and running,

  until those Southern shadows catch up to her.

  And with that in mind, I turn my mind back to where I began Rape is knowledge that knowledge changes how individuals heal and how they survive.

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2015/09/swan-feast-by-natalie-eilbert/
  Word count: 1981

  Sometimes I think of all the poems I have never read and will never read, all the poets—let’s narrow this down even to all the living poets—whose work I have never encountered and may never encounter in my lifetime. It’s a sad downward spiral, so I try not to dwell on these thoughts too long. Instead, I want to celebrate poems and poets who arrive in my life by one serendipitous twist or another, who widen and deepen again my sense of what a poem can do and why poetry is necessary in the world. Natalie Eilbert is one such poet.

  My acquaintanceship with Eilbert’s work was made possible by the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day project. Here’s a brief and whole-hearted plug for this free, perennial gift: Every weekday morning around 6:34 AM EST, a never-before-published poem appears in my inbox. (On weekends, it’s a previously published poem, often by a canonical poet, and these are a treat, too.) It is the cyber equivalent of a message in a bottle.

  If I’m already awake and at the computer, I keep clicking refresh, refresh, because this is one of the most refreshing rewards of my day—this first look at a poem, this shared experience with all the other people reading that poem just as it arrives or throughout the day, forwarding it to other people, posting it on Facebook. Then, I keep finding the poem again in the days and weeks that follow because someone else can’t keep the message to herself, and the bottle buoys its way serendipitously back to me.

  On July 30, 2015, the poem-of-the-day was called “Let Everything Happen to You.” What a wondrous imperative! I read the poem, read it several times, and I jotted down these lines: “I want to write sentences for days.” Yes! “I want days to not/be a sentence.” Yes! And then I read the poet’s biographical note and learned that her debut collection, Swan Feast, was recently released from Coconut Books. You can guess what I did then: I bought the book, I read it—several times—and then I wrote this review.

  Swan Feast is an appropriately enigmatic title for a book in which everything—rage, joy, grief, fear, pain, hope—will happen to you, and more than once, and in more than one way. This gamut of intense emotion is probed by the speaker in relation to two implicit, guiding questions: What is beauty (epitomized by a swan)? and What is hunger? (satisfied by a feast)? A third question seems to emerge in the act of writing, or the experience of reading, or both: What is the relationship between beauty and hunger? (Is beauty a form of hunger? Is hunger a form of beauty? And/or: Is hunger the means, beauty the end?)

  The vehicle for Eilbert’s provocative and prosodic meditation is the Venus of Willendorf, a four-inch statuette of a large-breasted, round-bodied, female figure uncovered during an archeological dig near Willendorf, Austria, in 1908. This statuette and several others like it have been dated to 25,000 BCE, thus pre-dating the mythological figure of Venus by millennia. By her designation as “the Venus of Willendorf,” this statuette challenges prevailing Western images of the Roman goddess associated with love, sex, beauty, and desire, and by extension, the physical embodiment of beauty itself.

  Our speaker in Swan Feast, who is sometimes identified/self-identifies as N, tussles with the autobiographical impulse throughout this collection. She tells us at the outset, as if it’s going to be easy: “I have my very own original story would you like to hear it” Yes! But it’s not only her story she wishes to tell. It’s her story in relation to another’s, the two yoked across the history of gender and desire: “My best friend was a fattie named the Venus of Willendorf.” Notice those two fricatives together: friend/fattie, the tension inherent in that harsh repetition of sound. We read on as N reveals: “I think of her creation as I sit in my office,” and then “the pain I presume her/ to possess in her fissures see since pain is a woman’s only natural/ possession.”

  First, there is what she is doing, N., our speaker, our guide. Then, there is why she is doing it:

  My heart was broken over a man, I should say I was what he spat out
  when he was done chewing the trash of my body. My days were occupied
  with nothing but writing Venus poems, a necessary way to escape
  the politics of addressing the I.

  At this moment, every reader who is also a writer must be pondering this poet’s preoccupation. Which figure—historical, mythological, both—enables our own “necessary way to escape/ the politics of addressing the I”?

  N’s articulate, self-aware confession continues:

  In love, my body diminishes beautifully. When my skin was a dead moth’s wing,
  hair fell out in chunks. The I became a joke to write about steeped as I was in
  declension. I was sorry to be in love with a man made of silt.

  And later still, N murmurs:

  see how I lack
  a creation myth

  It is a deft enjambment here, as we have watched her lack unfold—her lack as resistance to hunger, her lack as surrender to hunger, her lack as both/and:

  No one said immortality would be easy.

  I can train my hunger to do anything, and it listens.

  There is nothing but air between my thighs.

  But in the writing of this book, we see that Swan Feast becomes the very creation myth whose absence N laments here. We watch as our speaker, our guide, imbricates her own story, shingle by shingle, into the Venus myth, beginning with the section title “Venus of Anorexia.”

  One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Supplication with the Venus Figurine.” Here, as the intimacy between speaker and subject grows, N addresses Venus by her nickname, V. Instead of a third-person account, the interweaving of their life-stories, the speaker now incorporates second person to address her friend directly:

  In the long hours between

  your creation and my writing this, I called you

  inviolable, my bellicose buttercream, the language
  teetering into appellation and epithet.

  I drank all the myths down, tasted their sinus blood,
  and V, you are better than these muscle tales—

  The impulse is epistolary, and the effect is powerful. Who would you write to across time, place, and language? In other words, who is your mytho-historical pen pal?

  Then, another turn, another ratcheting of lyric intensity, when N doesn’t speak about V or even to V but as V. These later poems become a kind of channeling, N the medium for another comprised and uncompromising voice.

  This:

  I dare you to bury me back to dirt and spinsterhood. I dare you.

  And this:

  I have a scientist now, teams of them. They trace me back, or bless their hearts,

  they try.

  And this:

  To be a man’s specimen, I thought exile was the point of pleasure.

  Imagine now if your mytho-historical pen pal wrote back, across time, place, and language. Imagine if s/he engaged you in the very conversation you once initiated:

  I feel stuffed to the brim with alibis and strappy dresses. The world doesn’t want me but the world has awful taste. You spoil me with your excellent taste, N. You protect me from the dirt that seems to claim me again

  The lines here are unbroken, presented in prose the way a letter penned by hand extends to fill the full space between margins.

  At this point, the swans begin to appear, emblem of what we have learned to call beautiful, what even our fabled “ugly duckling” will one day grow to become. But these swans are subversive. They are shown “hissing” and “frozen” and “tumored.” Other traditionally beautiful entities like dresses and angels are likewise stunningly remixed. Behold this masterful, haunting image:

  Dresses all over a shore look like shot angels

  If Beauty is dead—beauty in the form of pretty, in the form of dresses that remind us of girls with curls and angels with halos, who of course evoke goodness and sweetness and also a feminized kind of learned helplessness—what then will rise to succeed the angels, to replace the dresses?

  One possibility:

  I’ve dreamt up a new Aphrodite: she is in a sea
  too shallow to reach any shore of earth—stranded
  she fucks herself, learns every feasible version
  of accident, again fucks herself until the waters warm to her body
  and rise. That’s why I feel so at home here.

  Aphrodite is another version of Venus, Venus by another name. N is another version of V, Venus by another name. We are no longer certain who is speaking here, who is dreaming. Or are N and V harmonizing together: two women, two bodies, one voice?

  The word feminism appears only once in what I consider to be a deeply fraught and deeply feminist—the two inform each other here—volume. We’re past the easy idealism of learning to accept ourselves just as we are. This is a swan that doesn’t fly, and N. reminds us: “No one worries over the image of a beautiful swan.” We worry instead over “the yoga bodies and the yoga bodies and the yoga bodies.” We live in a world where everything happens to us, “every feasible version/ of accident,” and so we can’t pretend we’re at peace, free from contradictions, even when we feel “so at home.”

  Perhaps this is why we’re beckoned—I think we are the Many, abbreviated simply as M—to the shore where dresses still look like shot angels. Even here, our speaker, our guide, is worried about her size, can’t shake the fear of being too large, exceeding the cultural capacity for beauty, for femininity—even in a dress that tells her by its spare, numerical mark she’s tiny:

  Come now the ocean is filling with seagulls

  and I must be allowed to speak of my feminism while also telling M how fat I’m getting in this size 2 dress.

  She will eat her words, of course, many times. She will “fork [her] failures until tender.” That fricative again, harsh but necessary. She will become the swan meat that is “swallowed down with gold, gold soda.” She will “grow into a small thing,” the ultimate paradox. But she will know this is happening, and she will name it as it happens, and the Venus of Willendorf will write her a letter of fraught, feminist encouragement:

  I don’t blame you, N. You write poems. You work in an office forty hours a week and come home nightly with a vague despair nestled against your spine when what you want to be is shattered and tearing the skin of your face until a new governance seals over your bones and someone publishes your book. I am so fond of you I would publish your dry skin cells, N.

  Everything happens in this book. Let it happen to you.

• Entropy
  https://entropymag.org/mud-woman-a-review-of-natalie-eilberts-swan-feast/
  Word count: 2105

  There are writers who you read / who you feel you’ve lived with / been born or gutted with. Where did I meet them? / Where do I meet them? In a dream. In a riot of mud. Natalie Eilbert once wrote to me and said something about trusting my writing / my poetry. I’m not writing that to bring myself into the conversation so much as to reveal the conversation exactly. Because that is also how I would describe my immediate reaction to reading Eilbert’s Swan Feast. This is bloodvelvet and a ferocity I trust. My friend, L, wrote to me not that long ago and wondered if it’s possible to trust anyone in the poetry world / in the creative world, what trust could even look like here. I look at the sprawl / the wound there is extraordinary suffering in / and agree, but then again, I read and here it feels. I don’t know what that small pulse means for our community or its ruins, which are not so different from the imaginary / real ruins Eilbert’s book opens with. “I am sick of drawing this connection: there is no document of civilization that isn’t also its ruins” – “The Life and Death of the Venus City.” America / Poetry in its current iterations is the collapsing / uprising Empire / the unnamed circulation that once existed where the centerpiece of Swan Feast, a sculpture named the Venus of Willendorf, was dug up / shorn from soil. Re-reading Eilbert’s poetry, letters we’ve exchanged, what’s been written, I’m always reminded that our writing continues (to breathe? to oscillate?) despite our changing distance / and our feeling to it. I forget how something came to be, what was once etched, and I glance again and am overcome but also am aware that the reminder / the recognition inflames change / layers of an infinite surrounding. Writing isn’t ours or is it? Dead and scattered beneath the earth, decently, decently.

  “For Venus, I wish only our beautiful women / dead and scattered beneath the earth, decently, decently”
  ddd–“The Death and Life of the Venus City”

  Swan Feast is full of a poetry and a trajectory that moves between intense concentration and enumeration. The book swarms around the limestone body / sculpture of the Venus of Willendorf found in 1908 (“a leap year, the same year oil was found in the Middle East” –“The Death and Life of The Venus City”) by a conglomeration of male archeologists in Austria who named her for a comfortable Western / Abercrombie and Fitch ideal of ancient femininity the she infinitely predates / obliterates (28,000 BCE – 25,000 BCE). She is not Venus, the statue of the woman with her arms cut off. She is not Venus, the heart goddess who hid her cunt out of shame / “modesty.”

  “The disgusting sun published my form, gave it culture, imagination”
  ddd–“Conversation with a Stone Wife”

  Where a Venus is a neat, easily (re)producible / easily translatable male fantasy, the Venus of Willendorf is a protrusion. I was going to use the word invasion here but that is incorrect in that it suggests that her presence is somehow too much / unwarranted. Though, of course, any space the female figure / the head-dressed figurine takes up / can be deemed too much / at any given time / in any (public) space. No, the Venus of Willendorf is a growth, a presence, a luminous ne(gate)ion. “N, I wanted to insulate and poison this body that made me to suck and taste and god there” –“[letter excavated from the willendorf tomb].” If the sculpture / the form is in conversation with anyone in Roman / Greek culture it is Baubo*, the oft excluded life / language who is described as bawdy, wise, loving, and cumbersome, who later serves as a model for the nurse character in Romeo and Juliet, who encounters Demeter wandering the earth mourning the loss / violent abduction of her daughter Persephone. Baubo lifts her skirts, exposing herself to Demeter, and it is this act that restores Demeter, it is this act that allows Demeter to act (to demand her daughter’s return) despite her grief. The cunt as revelation / as “vulva clown” / as compassionate exposure / as sharp, soft edge / as ward.

  Baubo shares a body and a “disproportion” with the Venus of Willendorf, who cannot stand upright, though she is displayed in all the pictures I looked up online (but not on Eilbert’s cover) as doing exactly that / exactly what she is built to refuse.

  “At what age does a woman’s body become the insult of a woman’s body,” asks Eilbert in “1. On the Confrontation with Men and History.” The I of the poem is a young thing staring at an old thing. She is the alive thing staring at the alive thing (of the past), the thing dug up from the ground. Her reaction to the old woman on the NYC subway, to the Venus of Willendorf, to her own body, is a tangling, engorged river. Eilbert’s question is marked with a period rather than a question mark because the answer is all age / any age. The woman’s body is always an insult to America / to Capitalism (Do you forget, too, that a “good” is also a fucking desirable product? “We are drawn to shit because we are imperfect in our uses of the good,” says Ted Berrigan.) / to those that gaze upon the space it can’t seem to stop taking up / to those that must continually acknowledge the malleable existence of the body when it would rather acknowledge its repetitive use / its static pleasure.

  “HOW MANY TOUCHED YOU BEFORE YOU TOUCHED BACK”
  ddd–“Peak Shift Effect”

  To Eilbert, the Venus of Willendorf is a difficult mirror / a confidant / a comfort / a regret / a continual mystery / a realigning / a breath / a power / a wife. I suspect, that like me, Eilbert can’t physically see / experience her body because of the considerable scars of distortion that tube through her.

  In love, my body diminishes beautifully. When my skin was a dead moth’s wing, / my hair fell out in chunks. The I became a joke to write about steeped as I was / in declension. I was sorry to be in love with a man made of silt. Back to my hands / they weren’t mine they looked aged, the sick skin of mule –“The Death and Life of Venus City”

  An eating disorder, its dying workhorse lodged in you, shatters an ability to fathom / to see what the body looks like. It is a permanent blindness / a permanent dare to the world to try to fathom a (phantom of) bodily distribution. I cannot face my body / I can. I am this physicality / I never will be. “I’m just an animal / And cannot explain a life” –“At Last,” Neko Case. What if the formerly ill girl / the still ill girl (the disgusting / ratty elegance of the park swan, the Natalie Portman swan) writes because it is the only way to remind the brain not to continually terrorize the body / not to eliminate the body / in a paradoxical fight for a life? Maybe that is just my experience. Reading this book, I relate to both sides of Eilbert’s consciousness, its frayed proliferations. I want to be the disciplined girl who knows how to starve, who chooses her margins. “College Boyfriend #1 taped us fucking once and remarked / later of my terrible thinness. I loved him only then” –“Supplication with the Venus Figurine.” I want to be the recovered girl who makes people uncomfortable when she speaks about her own disappearance / when she speaks about studying herself so openly. “Hallelujah, / you’ve yet to get my magic” –Conversation with the Stone Wife.” I mourn both.

  What is perhaps important about Eilbert’s treatment of the Venus of Willendorf is that she, in the second half of the book, literally weds herself / gets engaged to it, to a form that predates / obliterates / that cannot be her own / or America’s. I think it might be one thing to use the form brought up from the dirt just as a vehicle for soundly critiquing Western (exoticizing, eroticizing) treatments / reverences of history (though it’s extremely important that Eilbert does this and with such continual scope throughout the text). “A handsome particular / to fill with anthropological myth, another chance / for men to theorize those people” “1. On the Confrontation with Man and History.” I think it might be one thing to use the form just as a vehicle for reflection, for the pain of self-mirroring. “I will end up call the Venus of Willendorf / my queen and we will end up / fucking underneath the hood of her legendary cunt / until my skin disappears and she stays immortal” –“1. On the Confrontation with Man and History.” I think it might be one thing to use the form as a way to taunt our language’s condescending use of words like goddess and venus. “But V she’s an anti-city / no man can enter her” –“Dr. Szombathy Receives Our Letter.”

  Eilbert collapses all of these things into a complex, ongoing relationship, which gives the Venus of Willendorf the ability to reveal as much of herself as she wants while continuing to maintain what is unknown about her. The Venus of Willendorf remains and is an “alien star ris[ing]” (Feng Sun Chen). For Eilbert, the task in this writing is to love / rather than to worship. The task is to find yourself inextricable from something (despite distance / despite whatever). To find yourself close to something that perhaps can’t have its own agency, but can certainly have its own action / its own force in your life / in the text. In Swan Feast, the narrator / Eilbert is togethered with the form who writes her own letters to N. “And did it occur to you in all these years that I could speak for myself” – “[letter excavated from the willendorf tomb].” While betrothed to the speaker of the poems, V pisses under roses bushes and vomits along corridor walls. She makes demands as she goes.

  Her presence in the poems unravels / violates the quaint, compartmentalized portrayal of “excess” depicted in the textbook N inherited from her grandfather. Her presence unravels N, Eilbert.

  …I could say I loved nothing, my form was a medicine I took at the edge / of a lake. Venus was my wife I stayed inside her and the towers / they were connubial steel, forms were the quiet shapes behind closed eyes / I dripped and bled to touch, a way to say I was part of this. / To Olson, art is borne out of love: what remains is the city’s function, / what can’t be displayed only lived inside: consumed and marveling / whatever pastries are left in the landscape of oblivion. I take the Venus / like a doomed man clasps an amulet. The skyscrapers write their odes / to a distant village. In their glint there are chains unmoving / where our beautiful dead women won’t return to her wilderness –“The Death and Life of The Venus City”

  Closeness must unravel you or it can’t continue to be present in a radical way, which is why history (and modern life, really) often feels like such a remote smoldering to us. It must take up / inhabit space we are not supposed to. Eilbert isn’t supposed to implicate herself in history (and modern life) / incorporate herself into history (and modern life) / shudder + shoulder it. But, of course, she does. She does while weeping / exposing / touching her body / other bodies in the painful unknown. When Eilbert says, “I’m not sure if this body is mine,” she’s talking about her own body and the form of the Venus of Willendorf. What remains of the city, of history, of the rock queens, of the stone, is refusal / light and shadow falling all over each other. “The word no. / No” –“Chiaroscuro.” Eilbert dedicates herself completely to an enactment of history that is also an actual relationship to it / to herself / to a sick Anthropocene. Swan Feast is a violent autobiography, a girlface bleaching out of the headdress that adorns her / that feeds on her, a text that is both body / corpse, a speaking that acknowledges civilization / dissolves civilization into stone killing / into a stone that can kill the temple, a bursting / riot of mud / form / sculpture.

  I trust / it utters I trust / N utterly.

• Avidly
  http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2015/11/06/i-could-form-edges-a-review-of-natalie-eilberts-swan-feast/
  Word count: 1540

  Lately I’ve been carefully watching when I’m a victim, and when I’m not. I’ve been looking for ways out of a victim narrative, and noticing when I do or don’t have a way out. I’ve been thinking about what means are necessary to turn over victim/perpetrator narratives — I’ve been reading Adrienne Maree Brown on love and forgiveness as militant actions and I’ve been longing to trust rather than to hate the humans that are hard for me. I’m interested in how to communicate the truths of suffering but/and remain powerful.

  A few weeks ago I asked a Buddhist meditation teacher about how to let go of narratives of suffering when they continue to be re-written upon the body. He referenced a re-telling of the Sisyphus myth in which — instead of being doomed to continually roll a boulder back up a hill — Sisyphus realizes he can step out of the way of the boulder, allow it to roll down the hill, and go home. So too can we, the meditation teacher said, step out of the way of a narrative of suffering, realizing it is not located upon us or our bodies, and that our bodies are fluid enough to step out of the way.

  I was troubled by this — I’ve found myself troubled before by the new age-y admonition to “get out of your own way” — in terms of larger social conditions that continue to send the boulder our way whether we are reinscribing it or not. I was thinking about black bodies being terrorized in this country, being made victims of police violence again and again. I was thinking about gender and gender roles as heavy boulders. I know these two oppressions are not the same, and yet I was thinking of them both as boulders. I was thinking about bodies having boulders continually sent their way, boulders so heavy that they are very lucky and very strong if they can in fact step away.

  ****

  In her first poetry collection, Swan Feast, Natalie Eilbert does fascinating things with the embodied and re-bodied victim. The book dives in and around the Venus of Willendorf, a small sculpture of a woman found in 1908 and believed to date from between 28,00 and 25,00 BCE. The Venus’ origins and significance are mostly unknown, and thus in many ways she presents the perfect canvas for a relationship with gender and gendered embodiment, as Eilbert writes from the perspective of the Venus: They have latched their karabiners to my thighs and pulled me close, my sob story closer.

  How to speak to a mysterious sculpture– or have a sculpture speak– in any way that does not mean putting one’s own ideas onto it? And yet, Eilbert speaks, and takes responsibility for this putting-upon. The putting-upon itself becomes a central tenet of the book: Who do we talk to? Who do we talk with about what? When do we choose to talk of suffering? What does that talking do?

  For Eilbert, the talking is in part a way of returning to the capacity to speak. She writes, When I died I skipped home to tell her about it, no taste of mountains in my mouth. In Eilbert’s poems, the object of the Venus becomes the home to return to, with whom to speak. The object of the Venus seems to allow the speaker in these poems to settle into where she lives (her home), a city, “no… mountains.” At times the Venus is an object, and at times a character who joins the speaker in a city full of other objects and characters. What’s useful about this objectification is Eilbert’s fine-tuned attention to the stories we all know about objectification, and about gender. Eilbert’s speaker watches herself objectify the Venus, and watches gendered narratives move across the location of this sculpture, and of the surrounding city. She writes: the pain I presume her / to possess in her fissures see since pain is a woman’s only natural / possession.

  If pain — and confessing pain — is a woman’s only natural / possession, the speaker in these poems seeks to possess it as fully as possible. The speaker walks through this city, often slipping into a confessional mode — especially when she touches on themes of eating, eating disorder, and body. Eilbert writes in a mode familiar to many about control over body and hunger: I can train my hunger to do anything, and it listens.

  The I is clear here, and takes a stance as itself. It observes, is aware, locates itself as watching. The confessional speaker, however, has a habit of noting and re-telling the stories she sees around her without ownership. She possesses only herself and her control over this self, as in, I crave your calm, which like language I can’t claim.

  And yet, she is claiming something, over and over and over by stating it, by speaking it. What could it mean to claim by awareness? To claim by speaking aloud, and then releasing from one’s claim? In Eilbert’s poems, this claiming would mean a capacity to control which images come forward in her consciousness and which do not.

  Eilbert’s speaker expresses a dislocation from home — she has no home but adopts a home, adopts a conversation piece, adopts an I, adopts a place around which ideas of gender and power and violence can rotate. One gets the sense that she does this out of total necessity. She needs to locate herself within objects and stories in order to be able to operate in relationship to them, to be opened, for someone’s gaze / on my fissures. / To be smelled for the ice age inside me.

  I often felt relief throughout this book; the relief of a seeing, and then pushing back. A scientist’s gaze, as Eilbert references, or a pushing back from the table and saying: I see you. I am at the table with you.

  A series of poems in Eilbert’s book are entitled Conversation with the Stone Wife, evoking this pushing back, a titling, a conversation — but who is having the conversation? Is the Stone Wife the speaker herself, the statue of stone, or both? Can they merge? A true conversation or exchange is not always clear in these poems, and the series reads in many ways as a narrator just asking to be left alone, pushing the reader away for the narrator’s protection. A recognizable and familiar self-defense mechanism: I will push you away before you hurt me. I will not be hurt because you are stone. I will converse with you, but you will be stone. You will be stone, so I will not — cannot — converse with you. I will not be hurt because you are stone.

  And still, the speaker talks herself into existence. She takes responsibility for her talking, and in some cases notes the lightness that occurs when she talks of her own burderns: My burdens are entirely my own. How light they make us. Here, then, suffering and burdens are held in speech. They are held in the power to make others feel an experience of lightness — a power (or labor) of care with eons of gendered history. And yet, the speaker does not say, “how light they make you” but rather, “how light they make us” — the narrator is also made light by her own capacity to hold herself.

  Swan Feast is a story of speaking with/in power. It locates itself with a city as a place to put experiences, rather than putting them onto a body that has already been reproduced and layered upon beyond hope of clarity. The speaker tells us: I called this a city a place to store my men and wives a place for talking. The speaker acknowledges a power that is enacting itself upon her while simultaneously enacting her own power.

  This makes me feel relief, and gives me some hope. It gives me hope for the flexibility of victimhood, the reinvention and re-speaking that can emerge from positions without power. I feel relief because of Eilbert’s honesty, the kind of acceptance she allows us in lines such as, We simply don’t know how to escape empire do we.

  But I believe this book thinks that we do – do know how to escape empire. By speaking, enacting our own myth, and our own locations. The book whittles at these locations — body, myth, gender, power — and sees their weaknesses, their changeability. Eilbert writes, A stranger handed me a narrative of my life, and another made of stone. / I whittled a symbol in the shape of my body and handed it back.

  Maybe Eilbert’s poems are a hopeful, escaping version of Sisyphus because they stand right in the way of their boulders. They see those boulders coming and they stand in their way. They are flattened by those boulders, and arise again, re-whittled, re-shaped, whittling and handing it back.

• Sink Review
  http://sinkreview.org/reviews/natalie-eilberts-swan-feast.html
  Word count: 2924

  Swan Feast is a map of a city in ruins, an excavation, a homage to the Venus of Willendorf, who serves as a counterpart and a cypher; a frenemy and a wife; an excavation of a buried feminine lineage and a refusal to be complicit in beauty standards that seek to diminish, to whittle; an exploration of the inevitability of complicity and a slow progress toward fully and fearlessly inhabiting a female body.

  Reading Swan Feast in swathes is devastating. Eilbert’s poems, taken singly, have a relentless intensity, necessitating gasps to surface for air. The poems together accumulate a prodigious weight that threatens to crush. Hours on a hot roof in Brooklyn summer, day-drinking, sugar and metal in the mouth. Years under soil: the weight of dirt packed on dirt. Both of these experiences together.

  The use of the word weight twice is not an accident.

  I should note that I know Natalie personally, although we are not particularly close—I’ve never been to her apartment or seen her sob, but we’ve texted and I’m pretty sure I owe her a drink. I should note, too, that we share a deeply troubled history with food and our bodies, and that this history is “troubled” not in the “phase in junior high” way but the “life totally wrecked for years” way. My reading is, thus, colored by this.

  What am I trying to say about history? About our histories?

  I tried to map the book and kept going underground. Sometimes I was on a train going underground and sometimes it was just in my head. I wrote down: body (interior); excavation; body size; Venus; tomb; ruins; hunger; fire; men; emotions; Gnosticism; cruelty/ ruin in devotion; collapsed wreckage; excavation; burial; dead brother; ruin; mirrors; inner and outer landscapes; the failure of love; repeated command to look.

  “I am a hunger / I have a hunger / Feed me full with salt” - Alexis Pope

  The standard narrative of anorexia is of a slightly idiotic cheerleader so overenthusiastic about complying with beauty standards that she gets carried away, usually because she’s also afraid of growing up. For me, and, I suspect, for Natalie, it was an effort to subvert everything I was told: an attempt to twist the logic of relentless consumption so far it is turned on its head; a refusal to participate in imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy; a flying leap out of the nest.

  “I refused ration.” (28)

  Your towers
  are as dull a fiction as my headdress.
  How would
  anyone buy into that gesture. Fool’s city.
  Esurient shoppers.
  All the plates scrape clean, that hunger
  should disgust you more.
  I’m trapped in the gaze of an open mouth.
  My form is
  an open mouth, it is closing in time with
  the shockless guts
  which make massive your cities.
  (49)

  The standard narrative is sometimes that an eating disorder is a reaction to trauma. I’ll give them that one.

  “A mattress blackened// where my girl-body once lay. […] If, years later, I took men through my bay window, / there was still a hill out back made of all of me smoked.”

  Starvation as glut, a violent reaction to violence, a self-perpetuated psychic death.

  “Shame may be fatal”- Bhanu Kapil

  The standard narrative is of anorexia, then miraculous recovery after a quick hospitalization: not a decade of a half-life, not the warping and shifting of disorders—a slide into bulimia or alcoholism or some other brand of nuts—that everyone I can think of who has been sick for any length of time has experienced.

  I’ll fling open these doors like tremendous wind to see
  my grayed sorceress, stoned and ambling
  to her straw bed, condensed milk cans strewn at her feet.
  We have names for such women: yesterday’s newspaper
  floating in a pool, a single missing fork, the Finnish
  word for green. I swear I’m the truest Anne of all.
  (54)

  “She could wake up. She could be the kind of girl who woke up.”(64)

  It is worth noting that, while many female poets write about their relationships with their bodies, about what it is to have a body and navigate the world, Eilbert writes about the body’s interior more than any other contemporary poet I can think of. This is an internal excavation: not just writing against the male gaze or one’s own gaze in the mirror, but a troubled familiarity with being “a situation of meat” (Maggie Nelson).

  “I am so happy for the second I// exist, when I hug this porcelain god for strength, when/ your roundness makes me slight and ordinary./ When my bones are chains of midnight,/ joints that snap and twine.” (36)

  Much of this writing about the body is also about the body as a weapon, an uneasy exploration of the valences of using one’s body as a weapon to wield power over men. “My strength disturbs your hearts. It must / From now on / you are only to speak to me bourbon-lipped. I will award you / an amulet: My body on a silver string, against your chest/ heavy, unable to snap.” (40).

  There is a cruelty that is particularly feminine, an interrogation of the power in violence. There is mythologizing in a way that is more Ursula than Tinkerbell, e.g. more sea witch than forest sylph. These myths are not cute. These myths eat men like air.

  “Leave me my materials, my histrionics.” (47)

  “Suffer the nice girl, snort her frankincense down // with our normal animal cruelties. Yesterday I played my navel / like a bent harp until the sky stood up” (48)

  While the speaker is, of course, not the poet, and “V.,”the Venus character is not “N.,” the protagonist, she also is. Eilbert uses the “language of smug privilege” (90) to an extent I become slightly squeamish—I’m a bit annoyed by both this and her malice—yet I’m compelled to continue. (“this house is endless/ the guest list unbearable” [63]) “V.” and “N.” have an uneasy relationship, and their arguments remind me of the interior self-berating dialogue that fuels most women I know. (I throw up buttercream / in a nearby Dumpster I just can’t keep up with her appetite [79])

  It’s how we get shit done.

  Maggie Nelson writes, about depictions of cruelty in women, “Most obviously, there is self-vanquishing, sometimes to the point of mutilation…But girls can be very good at something else. They can be good at exposing the cruelties of others. And one disturbing subset of this talent involves the creation of scenarios that give others the option, or the opportunity, to behave cruelly.”

  “Names are given to everything / that will ruin, even you one day. Let a man decree you venus and watch // what happens.” (37)

  One of Eilbert’s favorite tap-dances is an extended torsion of logic—piling a cumulative sequence of clauses together in a way that can be difficult to follow but, once parsed, suddenly convince the reader of something they had forgotten they knew.

  A song memorized in childhood, forgotten.

  I am forever barefoot
  for the worms to wriggle my soft female skin. To be butter,

  to be the wolf in heat: now a cloud forms over the lake to welcome
  nothing, a family in blind procession. Means someone I love will die.

  Means I will walk from a distance toward a man with a shovel.
  Know that I have cracked the skin of love to discuss what

  patterns of body fit that liminal space where I fever.
  There is a certainty in the wings of a bat. In the house I can think

  of nothing but home’s symbol.
  (62)

  The Venus of Willendorf is, of course, a religious symbol beloved by Wiccans, Goth kids, and fans of Marion Zimmer Bradley. Eilbert’s text could be read as a religious palimpsest, a Gnostic gospel for the falling empire, a tract of a worship that is self-created, not indoctrinated or borne of obligation.

  I start to imagine the Venus of Willendorf in terms of

  aesthetic scale: today a woman decorates her house and incorporates African

  masks to give the space a pan-cultural design and no one thinks to stop this.

  The Venus is about four inches in height, and I think a mistake in thinking

  of her now is the impulse to consider her beauty. We see a naked torso

  of a woman and think to worship it, but it isn’t worship what we’re doing

  we’re checking emails we’re responding we’re filing resignations into the dirt.
  (21)

  Anorexia, of course, is a private religion, a kind of secret magic whose rituals are self-imposed, whose prayers are repeated fervently and constantly revised.

  “I can train my hunger to do anything, and it listens./ My hunger a fertility goddess rising/ under a calcium balm to son and son forever.// Trace my desires on a bonemap; I am yours./ There is nothing but air between my thighs.” (25)

  It’s a system of worship that, like Judaism and Paganism, is passed on matrilineally, requires perpetual study, and carries an unremitting danger of persecution. *

  “For days I repeated a proverb about poverty and thieves./ At night I would mouth the words for all the songs never// written in my most golden voice. I ate food from my palm/ gargoyle-crouched over a familiar ledge.” (29)

  Two of the book’s three blurbs compare Eilbert to Plath, a comparison I find interesting because, as Maggie Nelson “lest we forget, to be called the Sylvia Plath of anything is a bad thing" (The Art of Cruelty)

  When did Plath become a bad word?

  Confessionalism gets a bad rap, in part because it is often a gender-based criticism--- it’s a vague, accusatory catch-all. Borderline personality disorder is to mental illness as confessionalism is to poetry.

  I don’t feel confessionalism is inherently histrionic or lazy, but it does magnify and mythologize pain.

  Which is to ask: does understanding and illustrating suffering transcend it? Is it useful? Does it heal?

  Dorothea Lasky writes, in a course description for a class called “Beyond Confessionalism: A Poetics of the Everyday,” that she and her students will be “seeking to uncover how and why moving forward the term confessionalism does and does not apply to their poetry and how we might revise a consideration of their writing more as a kind of poetics of the everyday, which examines and exalts the beauty of experiential living and the workaday imagination as fodder for the poem” and that the goal is to “engage on a widening path of what their own work can do and to use the course as a way to revise their thinking and engagement with a burgeoning poetics that seeks not to just rehash on old memories on the page, but to use the space of the poem to make new ones.”

  That one is “Rehash[ing] on old memories on the page” is, perhaps, the danger of confessionalism.

  Plath’s Achilles heel may have been this, and that in doing this, she myopically held her pain and her memories as more important than others’ pain. Eilbert’s “persona” doesn’t make this move: she is fallible, and she digs her grossest worms out of her guts and holds them to the light. At certain points, I’m not sure I trust her or her “bored blood” or the figure she’s using as a cypher. She is not likeable—in fact, I find myself a little afraid of her. It is not just that Eilbert has created an unlikeable or untrustworthy character to serve as an punching-bag exemplar or coy craft trick. Rather, she has eviscerated her own narcissism, cruelty, and privilege as an embedded condition of being herself, that is, raised female in Long Island in late capitalism, a victim of trauma, white, Jewish, a writer, etc. This, in itself, is a radical act and speaks to her gifts.

  The worry is always whether my indulgence like a regular subject-predicate is universal.

  The worry is whether the scope of my writing now rests too firmly on autobiography and the sexual violence of autobiography.

  Does the writing inure itself to the act, does it inflict too much falsity around the feelings, and what exactly even is a trigger.

  I will not indulge I will not indulge I will not indulge.[…] I’m not sure if this body is mine.
  (87)

  Throughout the text, the fear that one is not profound or special is implicit. There’s a willingness to self-examine this that is markedly absent in most of the books by young [straight cis white financially secure] poets I’ve read. “Look how the decades suture panic to every hissing swan./ There’s so much religion in the tall grass along the highway edge,// I’ll wear the skull of every smashed raccoon until I feel as immortal/ as I am. I am so immortal. In all these years I said nothing profound.” (50)

  Maggie Nelson writes, about Plath, “One may love, respect, and admire the work, but one may not always feel like hanging out in its little room, or feeling the press of its walls. One may have to be, as they say, in the mood. In Plath’s case, I don’t see this airlessness as the mark of any reprehensible shortcoming (be it chemical, moral, or aesthetic), but more likely a result of the fact that she died too young to explore the voluptuousness or complexity of her cruelty, much less to ventilate it.”

  I would say the same is true for Eilbert.

  Thankfully, she’s alive.

  The historical complexity of the Venus figurine is imbued with the tides of exploration and commerce: follow the sugar, follow the flesh. Eilbert’s living body navigating space is tied to shuttling it to a desk in a city and sitting at it for a certain number of hours in order to survive.

  It’s not an accident that a workman found the Venus, or that an archeologist named Josef Szombathy is given the credit, or that it was carved of limestone not from the region, or that it passed through a countless number of hands before it became housed in a museum, lit by glass, or that it was found in a sedimentary deposit from a river, or that it was nicknamed “Vénus impudique" or “immodest Venus” “in a tone of mocking irony,” or that today, it is now called the Woman of Willendorf by archeologists.

  “Logistics somehow knows that it is not true that we do not yet know what flesh can do. There is a social capacity to instantiate again and again the exhaustion of the standpoint as undercommon ground that logistics knows as unknowable, calculates as an absence that it cannot have but always longs for, that it cannot, but longs, to be or, at least, to be around, to surround. Logisitics senses this capacity as never before – this historical insurgent legacy, this historicity, this logisticality, of the shipped.” (Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study)

  The G to the L train is hardly the Middle Passage, of course, but as Anne Boyer writes, “I have had all sorts of stupid bad luck lately but it is with this that I have composed from shreds of dire circumstances a ‘paycheck’ curating chimeras of mammals and entropy. A guy walks the streets he’s a flaneur. A woman walks the streets she’s a whore. PLEASE REPEAT. A guy walks the streets he’s a flaneur. A woman walks the streets she’s a whore.” (The 2000s)

  I tried to map the book and kept going underground.

  How do you map the aftermath of the blast? (There is no document/ of civilization that isn’t also its ruins. [15])

  I live in Brooklyn, near a train line that is at that point elevated. I work in Brooklyn, near a train line that is at that point elevated. Much of my time spent underground is spent transferring in Manhattan from one train to another train. This is also, not coincidentally, much of my time spent in Manhattan.

  In telling you this, I am trying to say something about my relationship with power: I like to slip under it. I don’t want to go up. I am inexorably aware of what’s up there.

  *Caveat for idiots: eating disorders are not cool or spiritual, do not make one holy, and do not come from a sacred tradition, much less comprise a legitimate religion.