Hemming the Water by Yona Harvey, and: The Vital System by CM Burroughs, and: domina Un/blued by Ruth Ellen Kocher (review)

To be a poet, woman, and teller of truths (no matter how unhinged those truths are from the beautiful parts of the lives played out) is to constantly be a woman on the verge. Poet Muriel Rukeyser believed such women would cause the world to split open. Well, someone should check the axis and equator. New collections from Yona Harvey, CM Burroughs, and Ruth Ellen Kocher showcase three women writers—in various stages of their truth telling—on the verge, drilling their pens into middle earth.

Yona Harvey’s debut, Hemming the Water, is a three-part canoe of language. It floats down the river of observation and storytelling, with strokes of jazz great Mary Lou Williams between the lines. The poetry is fluid and dependent on imagery. From the beginning, Harvey explores the intensities and constrictions of being a woman in the physical sense as a metaphor for the constrictions of being a woman, period. “Discovering Girdles” lets the reader take a wide-eyed peek at the metaphorical sense of the hidden, what is deemed ugly, or clunky, that women try to smooth away on their bodies and in their lives:

Black,white, another woman’s nude—whatever the color—its trick is to hide flesh, to constrict the skinlike a bit of truth, a secret buried in the gardenof women’s undergarments.

Harvey is willing to do the work. She is willing to go back (“To describe my body walking I must go back / to my mother’s body walking”) and tell the other sides of the stories. There are mothers, daughters, husbands, and people with and without titles flowing in her poetry. Storytelling is Harvey’s greatest poetic tool. Stylistically, Hemming the Water is adventurous—a mixture of free-verse and couture syntax. The proverb “still waters run deep” need not apply to these poems. From the mixtures of sound, colors, imagery of blue crabs, hurricanes, the devil, and the astrology of it all, the poems write against the still and are ripples to the page. Form is still something Harvey tries to reason with. It works, for most of them, but while some poems like “Theory of the Unheld” seem to aesthetically embrace the page, others like “The Riot Inside Me” seem to be overpowered by their form. There’s no doubt that Harvey is intentional with the visual climaxes of forms in the book, but the reading and arrangement do jar in a few poems.

“Communion with Mary Lou Williams” and “Devil Music” are the poet’s trademark poems in this collection. This homage to the jazz composer reveals the spiritualty of music and belief that something holy and wicked works in unison with language, vision, and poetic homage:

What you wanted wasa low-down connection.Boogie-woogie promiseof call & response. Musicjoined with spirit like the ball& socket of a swinging hip.

(from “Communion with Mary Lou Williams”)

His boat with one oar, his music that floats,his quilts for the weary, how he whispers,Lie back, with his humpbacked back, hiscrooked-letter back, stirring his sundown tonic.

(from “Devil Music”)

Every line hums from the page and speaks Lady Williams’s sentiment—“I’ve learned to pray … through my fingertips”—and gives the reader a personal performance of poetic storytelling. Hemming the Water is the beginning of what could be a promising repertoire from an extraordinary poet.

Extraordinary has definitely lent its spotlight to the work of CM Burroughs. One cannot simply glance over Burroughs’s verses, a poet who already has quite a presence in the literary world. A Pushcart nominee with fellowships from Yaddo and the Cave Canem Foundation, Burroughs has cultivated her work in some of the most revered writing spaces. Her debut collection, The Vital System, is a juxtaposition of voice and body poems that keloid the page, constructing beautifully contorted narratives...