Barnburner by Erin Hoover (review)
- Barnburner by Erin Hoover
I am from Appalachia, which means I pronounce "Appalachia" with short a's. I grew up between the river and the mountains. I know what it is like to live in a place that leads nowhere. Barnburner comes from that place. Erin Hoover's debut book chronicles life in dead end jobs in dead end towns. The poems begin in Appalachia and slowly move out in concentric circles to other parts of the country, while detailing the minutiae of being young and living a chaotic, yet mundane, life. She writes, "Sometimes one person is the gravitational center of shit going wrong."
Everyday things seem disastrous and are exasperated by the author's surroundings and life choices. This book makes me uncomfortable because it is such a close retelling of events that are vivid and real and concerning. I'm reminded of my own experiences with people in poor rural areas, where addiction and racism are the norm. These are the spaces where the female body is objectified and drugged:
I find an earring in the barbathroom sink, last thing
I remember, then lost eight hoursin its drain.
Kathryn Nuernberger introduces the text and focuses on the anger in each poem. She writes, "I think about how productive anger can be when it galvanizes us to action. And about those angers that just can't be made productive or useful, despite one's best efforts, so turn inward into a terrible, self destructive pain." I see that anger being turned inward in these poems. When issues of gender, race, or sexuality arise, the poet tries to face these issues head on but usually ends up questioning herself. She blames herself for continuing to date a rapist. She inserts herself into a racist scene in a grocery store when a group of white men gang up on an Arabic stock boy. Most emphatically, this anger is a result of being a woman, witnessing how women are treated in the world and in pop culture.
To those who say that Girlsis the third wave finding itself, who speakfrom the absurd position of having been foundI offer this founded but ahistorical fuck you:I swear our girlish centers burn white-hotas surely as nothing burns there.
There is an impotent rage buried in the female body and boiling to the surface. The anger runs the length of each poem, like a cigarette burned down and snubbed out. Cigarette after cigarette, these traumas add up to a whole life of experiences. What does it take for that slow, raging fire inside [End Page 225] to burst forth from the body and burn everything down?
Jayme C. Russell is the author of the chapbook PINKpoems (Adjunct Press, 2017). Her writing can be found in Black Warrior Review, Diagram, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. She received her M.A. in Poetry from Ohio University and her MFA in Poetry from The University of Notre Dame.
