Escape Velocity by Bonnie Arning (review)

The universe is a vast emptiness, speckled with a few planets glowing a multitude of colors as they reflect the light of slowly dying stars. This elegiac beauty is precisely what Bonnie Arning captures in Escape Velocity, a book of poems that contains the darkness of space, and the light of its stars. These thirty-six poems, broken into four sections of nine poems each, begin with the slow circles of the spheres, focusing on cosmic origin and stellar metaphor, then grow more fierce, becoming meteors that leave a devastating impact as the content turns to a miscarried child and physically abusive, suicidal husband. Form and function become tools for her to express the unrelenting ache for love in isolation, balanced only by the visceral shame of victimhood.

These two distinct themes are both established in the first poem, “Marriage Ephemera.” Arning writes about wanting to “pinpoint the moment” the narrator began to find her lover abhorrent, expressing her overwhelming distaste for him through the image of his jar full of animal bone fragments. These shattered pieces of livestock hint at the beatings mentioned in poems later in the collection, while the final lines hint at the attempts to capture humankind’s comparative smallness despite its huge ego. The poem ends with, “I worry all our knowledge of godhood / has been transformed into coordinates for darkness and light.”

Finding one extreme tucked away within the other is a common theme in Arning’s poems. “Las Vegas Strip, 4 A. M.” does this with anger and compassion, as the narrator talks of a desire to intimate with a man raging at passers-by. This poem, in the poet’s words, is about “the desire to ignite / make a torch of our bodies that won’t stop burning / against all the rage we can’t be rid of.”

Love and resentment find their place throughout her work as well, and while they’re polar opposites to some, Arning weaves them together with the inextricability of plucking one strand from a spider’s web. “Tight Spaces” begins with laughter, as the narrator reminisces about her and her love eating curry, and “drinking jasmine from tin cups.” As the poem progresses, bits of violence appear, foreshadowed by the spots of blood on the lover’s neck after he shaves. By the end, they’re screaming at each other, an argument that culminates with the narrator hurling a coffee pot into the wall, shattering it. She’s unable to pick all the pieces up, so “months later we still find slivers speckling our feet.”

Enhancing this thematic choice is her inclusion of two erasures, including her poem “Stand Burn,” which takes phrases from Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie.” It begins, “because / tell you what / steel windpipe / breathe still,” the phrases coming erratic and disjointed convey trauma and distrust. Much like the song, the poem ends, “because I love / you I love you lie / you lie I love you lie.”

Despite the focus on domestic violence, Arning is careful never to paint the narrator as a hapless victim. This is no damsel in distress, but a woman well aware of her own power, where it comes from, and her decision not to use it. “Siren Song” recalls the image of the broken coffee pot, opening with a description of the narrator’s father teaching her to use magnets to find iron, “each black sliver coaxed from the earth by force of its desire.” This driving force leads her to say, “I know love—white arm of lightning,” as such passion can be dangerous for all involved. She acknowledges her own part in the destruction of those who had loved her in the final lines, “I have been singing the siren’s song for years now— / learning at what frequency a man will dash himself upon / the rocks. I am the magnet his body desires collision against.” Arning is not shy or coy about the ferocity of love and lust.

In balancing this against powerlessness, the poem “Victim Mentality” opens with an anecdote about the...