The Stories Women Direct

Eason continuedfrom previous page use, and of negotiating motherhood despite the achings of the body (and all this under the pressure of life's gridded demands), these poems demonstrate the present—their raw openness tempts the reader to share in die sanguine pains of the contemporary day to day. As if to reground the poems' investment in the quotidian, Ackerson-Kiely's biography is simple and direct: "she works as a clerk and tends her family." And throughout the book, tending—mothering—is the skeleton: "The motel room is the color of/ breastmilk , nutritive water rinsing the palate of you," and on a night when mothers wolfed their children's rations hurriedly under a spotlight which was the only light and then boarded a boxcar for Minsk— and also, "Pity me, my fluoridated waters, my poison windowsills / my gnashing children." But this last lens, about as melodramatic as a Ralph Meatyard photograph (cf. "Michael with RED sign, 1960") gives pause. Though mothering is at the collection's core, the voice of the poems seems unused to it. The voice is stunned by the demands of necessity and obligation to an other. Scouring history ("Minsk") and every comer ofthe visceral and banal, the persona ofthese poems screams over its proffered landscape, perhaps seeking a return to some former free and unencumbered state. But given this, perhaps the aforementioned motherhood as skeleton is not the right idea—even the mother is somehow a product of some dark, necessitating geography—a realm that demands fast thinking and even faster living. Perhaps mother is the becoming soul of the work—and perhaps it is finding its footing? Lost in the darkness, the mother that occasionally bubbles to the fore of the voice of these poems says to her children, "Keep up." From "Furniture Shopping": He said you don't have to go to the grave to talk about the grave. The furniture in shambles. The chair a stomach cramp. What will you look like in fifty years he mumbled, closer than me. I don't care if the pencils are dull I don't care if a partridge never gilds the railing I don't care for all of the crying babies I can't seemed like the only reply. It was new when we came by it. Stained by which I mean several coats laid down, warm and brown laid down to him at once. Tung oil. His mouth the burden of several mouths debating. What the hell am I doing. He said a futon. He said minimalism. Buffet armoire ottoman ten thousand excited women at his feet. Later Ataturk, loosed hair, educate me. I will build the home I will die in the home I will build. The reader is given over to a trail of crumbs, to a forest, with little choice but to follow. In "Furniture Shopping," we are brought in at action's end: the purchases are mined and some strange affliction plagues the stomach. What occurs in this poem is the essential crux of the book—is the speaker free to be, or is the speaker bound by body and the consequences of recklessness? And are they consequences? "He said you don't have to go"—and the narrator stays, leaving one to assume that this person must then suffer some dark and unnamed penalty (implied in the man's coy tone, and the grounding, initial image of the "grave"). But instead, the sinister world is sundered for a possible paradise—brief in that it only appears at poem's end and begs of the world to conform to its hope. Or it demands the speaker reside in her determination to make the destroyed furniture and its setting into a home. The result—possibly pregnancy, given the image of "cramp"—is merely a hurdle to be crossed toward abandon; the final notion is full surrender toward a possible earthly paradise— such abandon we all wish we had. The finality of the closing line, together with the secure image of homebuilding, denote a kind of worship—through the temple, or ritual, of pleasure the house has been sanctified. The morning sickness ofthe early poem has been subdued via the...