Home Is What You Make of It

Urja Home Is What You Make of It Karla Huston Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework Edited by Pamela Gemin University of Iowa Press http://www.uiowa.edu/press 208 pages; paper, $24.95 While I finished reading this book, I unloaded the dishwasher, swabbed the toilet with the latest miracle product, packed the recycling, and hauled the trash to the outside bin, the whole time considering what I'd write in this review. Oh, and I also made lunch. Housework. I learned about it under the watchful eyes of my mother and grandmother, who often did spring and fall housecleaning together, a ceremony practiced in the fifties and sixties in which lace curtains were washed, rinsed, and stretched in the sun. Bedsprings were hosed to remove dust. Rugs were brought outside for the semiannual beating, letting fly the months of dirt neither my grandmother's Electrolux nor my mother's Hoover captured. When the women were finished with their cleaning, every surface in the house gleamed from the touch oftheir mops and rags and brooms. In this collection, Pamela Gemin—coeditor of Boomer Girls (1999) and editor of Are You Experienced (2003)—considers the nature of"house" work: cooking, cleaning, washing, sewing. Her introductory essay (a piece which alone is worth the price of the book), considers the rites of domestic work by which women of all cultures have been trained and the "tribe" to which women belong. "Whether we are fully present in our tasks or 'gone in the motion' of performing them, whether our stovetops are home to 'stewpots of discontent' or Grandmother's favorite jam, something is always cooking." Indeed, many of these poems offer "stewpots of discontent," kettles simmering for and from work that seems never finished. Faith Shearin, in her poem "The Sinking," writes: I am bent over a sink of heavenly suds my hands moving like angels in wind when I find myself weepy with work I will never make done. Beside me a garbage bag opens and fills like some hungry lung and my newest shoes wear the fine lines of age. Even as I gaze at the just-folded laundry I am seeing the first shirt I will open the way a diver opens water. And in her poem "Furious Cooking," Maureen Seaton simmers when she observes: Where the chicken spread-eagled on the butcher block could be anyone and you don't even bother to say thanks for your life, chicken, or regret the way the little legs remind you ofjust that. Where the bay leaves aren't eased in but thrown voilà into sizzling olive oil which bums the poulet nicely along with the onions alerting the fire alarm and still you think, good, let the landlord worry I'll bum this bitch down. It's that kind of cooking that gives your family agita, big Italian-style pain, even if it's only fricassee the way your Nana used to make it. Yet, there's more brewing in this book than women poets filled with angst about the housework they must do. There are poems that remember the women who taught the poets, poems in which women anguish over lost mothers and aunts who are no longer around to tutor, to help. These poems recall lost mothers who always knew what to do, like Allison Joseph's character in "Domestic Humiliation": What would my mother say if she could see the piles of clothes growing larger, more frightening in the corner...? What would she say about the disarray of books and papers. . .? [T]his apartment grows dirty in ways I didn't think possible.... Until I can learn to hear what she once said, I'll be here: grief mine, floor unwaxed, mop dry. This work, the rites ofthe tribe, certainly can matter. While many poems are filled with rage and regret and grief, there are plenty that attend to ritual and to whatGemin calls a "good tired": the day done, everyone fed, the kids in bed, those sun-dried sheets, the sparkling floors and shining tables. In Jeanne Bryner's "Part of a Larger Country," her narrator wonders aloud: In the busy land of pretend, maybe...