Richard Jeffrey Newman

In Novem­ber of last year, I was inter­viewed by Marina Yoffe, founder and direc­tor of Jack­son Heights Poetry Fes­ti­val, an orga­ni­za­tion whose advi­sory board I sit on, and I never got around to post­ing a link to the excerpts from the inter­view that JHPF put up on its web­site. There were, I think, bet­ter moments from the inter­view that they could have used, but I like this nonethe­less. Any­way, bet­ter late than never. So here ’tis:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8mpj0VkF84]

Here is the text of the two poems I read. (If I had a tran­script of the inter­view itself, I would post that too, but I don’t.)

Melissa’s Story

The doc­tor gave instruc­tions like a spy:
Be there, seven pm, on the dot.
If you’re not, I’m gone. Don’t even think about
another appoint­ment. Got it? That day,
of course, there was traf­fic, and the money
had to be in small, old bills. You will get
in my car as if we were lovers. At the spot,
you’ll step out first. Walk when and where I say.
Make a mis­take and I leave. Under­stood?
I did. Some­how it went with­out a snag,
and there I was, legs open on a bed,
with a man crouched between them like a dog.

He reached into me and scraped away the life
I’d almost made, not yet mine to give.

///

The Silence Of Men

A man I’ve never dreamed before walks
into my apart­ment and sits in the green
chair where I do my writ­ing. He car­ries
in his left hand a large erect penis
which he places silently on the floor.
The phal­lus begins to waltz to music
I can­not hear, its scro­tum a skirt;
its tes­ti­cles, legs cut off at the knees.

I want to know why this dis­fig­ured
man­hood has been brought to me. I look up,
but my guest is gone. His organ, deflat­ing
in short spasms like an old man cough­ing,
spreads itself in a pool of shal­low blood.
The silence between us is the silence of men.

If you want to know more about my work, my web­site is www​.richard​jnew​man​.com; and if you’d like to buy my book, you can find it on Ama­zon or Barnes & Noble, but I would ask that you either buy it directly from the dis­trib­u­tor, UPNE, which directly helps my pub­lisher, CavanKerry Press, which is a fine small press that can use the help, or find an inde­pen­dent book­store on indiebound

All I can say is oy! Porn Indus­try Seeks Fed­eral Bailout.

I read this at Stacy Lynn Brown’s blog, Ten Fin­gers Typ­ing, and was hor­ri­fied. If you fit the descrip­tion in my title, go read it now.

So I am lay­ing here on the couch at 2:38 AM with my right ankle inflamed and excru­ci­at­ingly painful — though not as painful as before — and I am test­ing Word­Press’ mobile fea­tures because I have been hav­ing a ridicu­lously hard time get­ting back to sleep. We are hav­ing com­pany tomor­row and I am sup­posed to be cook­ing and I am won­der­ing how I am going to stay on my feet. At least the food I am going to pre­pare is easy.

I wish I knew what brought this attack on. If I could be sure it was the lit­tle bit of meat I ate this past week, that would be okay. At least I would know. And if I could be sure it was the Apis — home­o­pathic rem­edy — that would be okay too. Not know­ing, though, leaves me feel­ing, again, kind of help­less in the face of this con­di­tion. I don’t like it that I have had to take colchicine again; I was so happy with how good I was feel­ing up until the attack started last night. And I don’t like the feel­ing that I must have done some­thing “wrong,” not in the moral sense, obvi­ously, but in the sense of some­thing that has set me back in terms of what I need to do to man­age this condition.

Ah well, that’s enough kvetch­ing for now. I am going to try to sleep.

My faith lies else­where. When I fin­ished read­ing Joshua Kryah’s Glean (Night­boat Books, 2007) and started think­ing about what I would write in my review of the book, that is sen­tence that came to me, almost as if it had been wait­ing — who knows how long? — somewhere in the back or just below the sur­face of my con­scious­ness for me to read the final lines of “Come Hither,” the last poem in the book:

Who will draw you out, now
that you’ve given your­self over?

                Who dis­solve
your body like a host on their tongue?

What stop­ping place will be pro­vided, what
rest?

Where am I in this emer­gence—
who comes?

The “you” here is God, or, rather, the god that faith places on the other side of the absence that is all, accord­ing to the monothe­ism I was taught grow­ing up, human beings can ever really know of the one divine being. Yet the first two ques­tions here are not about this god per se, but rather about those whose task it is to draw this god out into the world and take him into them­selves. In the face of the absence that is also the divine — and that is, there­fore, in itself per­haps the deep­est and most fun­da­men­tal test of faith — who will those peo­ple be? At the same time, the speaker of the poem is clear that some­thing is emerg­ing — some­thing which, based on the first two ques­tions, we can assume the speaker believes to be God. Then, out of that clar­ity another ques­tion emerges. What is the speaker’s posi­tion in the emer­gence, not in rela­tion to it, as if he were stand­ing out­side of it, watch­ing what was hap­pen­ing, wait­ing to see the end result, but in it, as part of it, and once the speaker places him­self within this emer­gence, who is emerg­ing is no longer clear. The pos­si­bil­ity exists in the lan­guage that it is the speaker who is emerg­ing, that he is watch­ing him­self become, that he has dis­cov­ered his god within him­self, that he has come to accept that he is him­self, some­how, within his god.

Ques­tions of faith have been impor­tant to me since I was a teenager and I believed my future lay in the rab­binate. When I set aside the faith that being a rabbi would have demanded of me, how­ever, I did not set aside the strug­gle to come to terms with the final, indif­fer­ent and absolute absence that will fill the space where I used to be in the moment after my death. It is a mea­sure of Kryah’s suc­cess that, despite the fact my faith lies some­where very other than his — and since this is a review of his book, I am not going to turn it into an essay about my own spir­i­tu­al­ity — the poems in Glean nonethe­less con­fronted me with the ques­tion of just where, pre­cisely, my spir­i­tu­al­ity does lie. In large mea­sure, the poems accom­plish this through metaphors that ground the issues they raise firmly in the body. Here, for exam­ple, are the first few lines of “My Easter:“

Breath­bloom, the res­ur­rec­tion lily
spent on its stem,

        the pale throat thrown back
    announcing — what?

Behold, all at once,
         the flesh-like knot
undone, each petal released, their beauty un–
mis­tak­ably and

already gone.

And here is “O Hiero­glyph (for­got­ten word, spread your lips around me)” in its entirety:

As if the wet vowel might speak.

As if, plun­dered,
        it might give up its blank stare, and
sud­denly, shud­der in my mouth.

We exchange a lan­guage
             dumb as flesh, pressed into and bruised
beyond recog­ni­tion, its only response the black eye’s dull cir­cle of speech.

Blue, blue-brown
         each color off­set by the sur­round­ing skin,
the cal­cite thought of your return­ing again.

I can­not muster
        what I should have lost, and in the wish gained
more stead­fast: your curio, what swings from a locket upon my chest,

a mes­sage that now only speaks
with its fist.

The note I wrote to myself on the page below this poem says, sim­ply, “Donne?” The fist in the final line recalled for me Holy Son­net #14, “Bat­ter my heart, three-personed God,” and, indeed, I found myself think­ing of Donne’s Holy Son­nets often while read­ing Glean, so much so that I read through the sam­pling of them in the edi­tion of the Nor­ton Anthol­ogy that I have on my shelf before I sat down to write this review. Donne’s poems, too, are rooted in the body, though very dif­fer­ently than Kryah’s. For while Kryah metaphorizes — if I can coin a term — the body, and the phys­i­cal world in gen­eral, to give pres­ence to the absence in the face of which he ques­tions, asserts and main­tains his faith, Donne posi­tions the body in his poems as Other to his god, whose pres­ence in the world the poems them­selves — at least the ones I read — do not doubt for a minute. I also thought of Donne’s Holy Son­nets while read­ing Glean because, despite the fact that Kryah’s poems are writ­ten in a very free verse — the sen­tence frag­ment and the uncon­ven­tional spac­ing of the poems seemed to me just about the only two for­mal devices used con­sis­tently through­out the book — his poem’s share with Donne’s a sense of lan­guage as some­thing phys­i­cal, some­thing to be felt, held in the mouth, savored and then released.

In all hon­esty, I don’t know that I will pick this book of poems up again. It has said to me what it has to say, and it’s not some­thing I need to hear again. Still, I admire, deeply, the craft and com­mit­ment, the hon­esty and courage that went into writ­ing it. It is the kind of book I think every­one should have to read once, the kind of book that those to whom it truly speaks will trea­sure for the rest of their lives.

Con­trol­ling Ques­tion: The usage(s) of and relationship(s) between the terms “Per­sian” and “Iran­ian” in cur­rent dis­course — lit­er­ary, cul­tural, polit­i­cal and oth­er­wise — is a com­plex one, with each term simul­ta­ne­ously con­ceal­ing and reveal­ing highly con­tested and politi­cized posi­tions regard­ing the nature of cul­tural, national and per­sonal iden­ti­ties. The lit­er­a­ture pro­duced within the space(s) defined by these posi­tions dates back to at least the 10^th cen­tury, when Fer­dowsi com­posed the Shah­nameh using almost no Ara­bic loan words, an act of lit­er­ary sub­ver­sion that almost single-handedly res­ur­rected Per­sian as a lit­er­ary lan­guage in the face of what had been Arabic’s dom­i­nance. Today, the lit­er­a­ture being pro­duced within these spaces is writ­ten in (or trans­lated into) many lan­guages other than Per­sian, in coun­tries far beyond the bor­ders of the ancient Per­sian Empire, and by peo­ple whose con­nec­tions to what­ever is defined by the terms “Per­sian” and/or “Iran­ian” are any­thing but mono­lithic. Given all this, is it fair to call this lit­er­a­ture a world lit­er­a­ture? If not, why not?

For a spe­cial edi­tion of Arte­News, the online jour­nal pub­lished by ArteEast, we are solic­it­ing sub­mis­sions in the fol­low­ing categories:

1. Essays of 1,000 – 1,500 words in response to any aspect of the con­trol­ling question.
2. Essays of 1,000 – 1,500 words that address any other aspect of Persian/Iranian literature.
3. Poetry: 3 – 5 poems, includ­ing trans­la­tions from any his­tor­i­cal period, that fall within the space(s) defined by the con­trol­ling ques­tion. The poems need not have been writ­ten orig­i­nally in Eng­lish, but any non-English poems must be accom­pa­nied by strong, lit­er­ary, Eng­lish trans­la­tions. Trans­la­tors must show proof of the right to pub­lish the translations.
4. Short sto­ries or mem­oirs, using the same guide­lines as for poetry, of between 1,000 – 1,5000 words.

Please send sub­mis­sions, with the sub­ject head­ing Arte­News Sub­mis­sion, to richardjeffreynewman@​verizon.​net.

Amy Unsworth, whose blog, Small Branches Poetry, you should check out, has writ­ten a per­cep­tive review of my book, The Silence Of Men, in The Pedestal Mag­a­zine. (I espe­cially like it when she points out that it would be inac­cu­rate to clas­sify my work as con­fes­sional in any sim­plis­tic way.)

The Pedestal is a good lit­er­ary mag­a­zine, which is worth read­ing. I hope you’ll give it some of your time.

Some­thing new I have decided to do with my blog. I will be, from time to time, post­ing works in progress for peo­ple to com­ment on. Usu­ally, these post­ings will be from my trans­la­tion work, though I might also put up some of my own poems or prose. Please stop by from time to time and let me know what you think.

How does the cur­rent fight­ing between, on the one hand, Israel and Hamas and, on the other hand, Israel and Hezbol­lah, not make one sick with grief and rage? Actu­ally, to call what is hap­pen­ing in the north “fight­ing between Israel and Hezbol­lah” is to make what is actu­ally going on there invis­i­ble, because what is actu­ally going on is a cam­paign of airstrikes against Lebanon that, accord­ing to Louise Arbour, the UN’s high com­mis­sioner of human rights, is quoted in today’s times as say­ing could, because of “the scale of killings in the region, and their predictability…engage the per­sonal crim­i­nal respon­si­bil­ity of those involved, par­tic­u­larly those in a posi­tion of com­mand and con­trol.” In other words, they could qual­ify as war crimes. Doesn’t mat­ter how wrong Hezbol­lah was to cross over into Israeli ter­ri­tory — and make no mis­take; it was wrong — Israel’s response is far out of pro­por­tion to that act, and the argu­ments I have heard to the con­trary do not con­vince me otherwise.

Such argu­ments include the one that I heard Israeli offi­cials giv­ing on BBC yes­ter­day, in which they rea­son that they are, by destroy­ing Hezbol­lah — and they are, of course, arrogant enough not to see that what they are doing might actu­ally increase sup­port for that orga­ni­za­tion — is cre­at­ing an oppor­tu­nity for the Lebanese gov­ern­ment to step in and take charge of its own coun­try. As if, when the bomb­ing is over, and assum­ing that Hezbol­lah has indeed been wiped or suf­fi­ciently crip­pled as to be unable to operate, the Lebanese gov­ern­ment might actu­ally turn to Israel and say, “Thanks for tak­ing our coun­try back more than twenty years and for killing how­ever many inno­cent civil­ians; you’ve really done us a favor.” The rea­son­ing is not much dif­fer­ent from the one we heard when the US invaded Iraq, that the peo­ple would be out on the streets wel­com­ing our sol­diers with flow­ers, and we have seen how accu­rate that pre­dic­tion was.

The other response I have heard — or read; I don’t remem­ber which — from Israel to accu­sa­tions that their response to Hezbollah’s incur­sion has not been pro­por­tional is that the response is in pro­por­tion not to the spe­cific act, but rather to the risk posed to Israel by Hezbollah’s pres­ence on its norther bor­der. I don’t know if I can say this with­out seem­ing to jus­tify what Israel is doing — because I am adamantly opposed to what Israel is doing — but this is a response I have some sym­pa­thy for. What­ever one wants to say about the his­tory of Israel’s found­ing (and, let’s be hon­est, that his­tory is the his­tory of one peo­ple sys­tem­at­i­cally appro­pri­at­ing — some­times legally; some­times not; some­times peace­fully; some­times not — the land of another peo­ple), the fact is that Israel exists now as a sov­er­eign nation and it is no small thing for any sov­er­eign nation to have on its bor­ders even one, and Israel has two, enti­ties sworn to its destruc­tion. More to the point, at least one of those enti­ties, Hezbol­lah, has the strong enough back­ing of at least two nations to the point where it can func­tion almost as a sep­a­rate gov­ern­ment within the sover­iegn nation of Lebanon. In other words, Hezbol­lah is set up such that it can claim the pro­tec­tions afforded by, and gains the “shield­ing ben­e­fits” of being in another sov­er­eign nation, even as it oper­ates inde­pen­dently, or can oper­ate independently, of that nation’s government.

Given that sit­u­a­tion, and the fact of an Hamas-led Pales­tin­ian gov­ern­ment, how should Israel have responded to what, in almost any other cir­cum­stance, would have been inter­preted as an act of war? (And I am talk­ing here only about Hezbollah’s incur­sion. Hamas is the elected lead­er­ship of an occu­pied peo­ple; their sit­u­a­tion is, for me, very dif­fer­ent.) Let me say this again: I do not mean that I think Israel should have responded as it did. I am hon­estly ask­ing what Israel should have done. Nego­ti­ate indi­rectly, as Hezbol­lah demanded?

July 21^st

I started this post yes­ter­day and then got inter­rupted and so I don’t remem­ber pre­cisely what I was going to say next about Hezbollah’s demand that the only way the two sol­diers they hold would be returned would be through indi­rect nego­ti­a­tions for an exchange for pris­on­ers in Israeli jails, but I do know that part of the gen­eral point I wanted to make was this: At some point, Hezbol­lah needs to bear some respon­si­bil­ity for its refusal to rec­og­nize Israel and for the behav­ior in which it engages as it pur­sues its goal of Israel’s destruc­tion. Still, I write this after read­ing yes­ter­day that Israel has hinted there might be a full-scale inva­sion of Lebanon, though in today’s paper, Israeli offi­cials are talk­ing about “pin­point” oper­a­tions to “clean up Hezbol­lah posts on the ground.” Either way, the real­ity of what that inva­sion will mean for the peo­ple of Lebanon seems to make any­thing else I might have had in mind to write seem self-indulgent and point­less. (And I haven’t even said any­thing about what is going on in Gaza yet.) How dare I, it seems to me I have to ask, pose ques­tions about Hezbollah’s respon­si­bil­ity when Israel is clearly doing far more dam­age to Lebanon than Hezbol­lah has ever done to Israel? But I have to admit such ques­tions keep com­ing back to me, not because, I will say it again, I think Israel is right to have responded the way it did, but because it seems to me that Hezbol­lah invited this kind of sit­u­a­tion by set­ting itself up in such a way that it is woven inti­mately into the daily lives of the peo­ple who live in south­ern Lebanon. In other words, if there is such a thing as national sov­er­eignty, and if Israel pos­sesses it, and if Hezbol­lah, an orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cated to the destruc­tion of the State of Israel, violated that sov­er­eignty, and if Israel, as a sov­er­eign nation, has the right to respond to such vio­la­tion (indeed, given the fact that some sort of mil­i­tary response on Israel’s part was at some point almost cer­tainly pre­dictable), who bears respon­si­bil­ity for the fact that, in order to attack Hezbol­lah, even the most restrained attack one could imag­ine, Israel would likely have to attack areas where there would almost cer­tainly be sig­nif­i­cant civil­ian casu­al­ties? Should Israel there­fore not attack, ever, at all? Does Hezbol­lah get to keep doing what it does, being who it is, on Israel’s bor­der in per­pe­tu­ity and with impunity?

Israel should have, as the US should have with both its bomb­ing of Afghanistan and its inva­sion of Iraq, gone first to the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity and not acted uni­lat­er­ally, even though it is arguable that, as a sov­er­eign nation, uni­lat­eral action was their right. Whether or not the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity could have secured the release of the two kid­napped sol­diers, such a move would have given any actions the Israeli’s decided to take against Hezbol­lah a good deal more legit­i­macy. Not that it would have jus­ti­fied the car­nage Israel is now inflict­ing on Lebanon; I don’t think any­thing jus­ti­fies that. Instead, though, Israel has cho­sen to act in a way that is con­sis­tent with its sta­tus as an occu­py­ing power, even though it was not occu­py­ing south­ern Lebanon, and the real­ity is that, next to this fact, my ques­tions pale, because even if Hezbol­lah is respon­si­ble for what it has done, for where it is and for how it has set up its oper­a­tions, that respon­si­bil­ity should not be used to obscure what Israel has done and how it has set up its operations.

I have great sym­pa­thy for the bind that Hamas and Hezbol­lah put Israel in: How do you live at peace when your neigh­bors have sworn them­selves to your destruc­tion? How often do you allow those neigh­bors to hurt you, to dam­age you, before you are left with no choice but to fight back? And how, once you decide to fight back, do you not make the destruc­tion of those who would destroy you one of your goals? But here’s the prob­lem, once you start ask­ing those ques­tions, you have almost no choice but to start talk­ing about this his­tory of Israel’s found­ing, and once you start talk­ing about that, the com­pet­ing his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tives and claims of atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted and so on of the Israelis and the Pales­tini­ans – not to men­tion of those who, in the rest of the world, sup­port whichever side they sup­pot – make it impos­si­ble to see how any res­o­lu­tion can ever be reached.

I don’t know. Some­times I get so frus­trated that I think they should all just fight each other into obliv­ion; nei­ther side seems will­ing to do what it needs to do to achieve a real and last­ing peace. But that also is not an answer, and so I go back and forth between and among anger and rage and, most of all right now, deep, deep sad­ness. Because I don’t see a way out. Because whether or not Israel destroys Hezbol­lah, this war will not have the effect Israel hopes it will have. Because if Hezbol­lah and Hamas suc­ceed in destroy­ing Israel, it will be for the Israelis what the cur­rent war in Lebanon and Gaza is for the Lebanese and the Pales­tini­ans, and it will be the vic­tory of a cer­tain kind of reli­gious and polit­i­cal extrem­ism, of reli­gious impe­ri­al­ism, and, on the other hand, it will be hard not to read as yet one more exam­ple of why the Jews need a coun­try of their own (even though I per­son­ally do not agree with that posi­tion). Because, because, because, because, because.…. It all makes me think of a poem by Saadi, a 13^th cen­tury Per­sian poet selec­tions of whose works I have trans­lated. This is from his Gulis­tan. He wrote it at a time when it was the Mus­lims who held real power, but the point of the poem, I think, is well taken today. It’s from the last sec­tion of the book, called, in my trans­la­tion, “Prin­ci­ples of Social Conduct.”

Every­one thinks his own think­ing is per­fect and that his child is the most beautiful.

I watched a Mus­lim and a Jew debate
and shook with laugh­ter at their child­ish­ness.
The Mus­lim swore, “If what I’ve done is wrong,
may God cause me to die a Jew.” The Jew
swore as well, “If what I’ve said is false,
I swear by the holy Torah that I will die
a Mus­lim, like you.” If tomor­row the earth
fell sud­denly void of all wis­dom
no one would admit that it was gone.

I know I’ve writ­ten this else­where on this blog, but I have more to say about it, so I am going to write it again: CavanKerry Press, a small, inde­pen­dent pub­lisher based in New Jer­sey, pub­lished in May of this year my first book of poems, The Silence Of Men. (That link leads back to CavanKerry’s web­site; if you want to read more sam­ple poems or the text of Yusef Komunyakaa’s Fore­word or to find out more about me and my work, check out my own site.) Aside from the press’ obvi­ous and deep com­mit­ment to poetry, one of the great plea­sures I have had in work­ing with CavanKerry is the fact that they pro­duce visu­ally stun­ning books, and I am talk­ing here not only about my own book, the cover of which Peter Cusack painted specif­i­cally in response to my poem, but also about each of the six CavanKerry books I found recently in a used book­store in Man­hat­tan: Harold Levy’s A Day This Lit, Joan Seliger Sidney’s Body of Dimin­sh­ing Motion, Ken­neth Rosen’s The Ori­gins of Tragedy, Geor­gianna Orsini’s An Imper­fect Lover, Eloise Bruce’s Rat­tle and Andrea Carter Brown’s The Dishelveled Bed. (They can all be found on CavanKerry’s web­site here. I should also men­tion that Peter Cusack has a blog that’s worth check­ing out.)

I wish I could afford to buy the books from CavanKerry at full price, but I can’t. In fact, hav­ing paged through each of the books now a cou­ple of times, and assum­ing they are indica­tive of the qual­ity to be found in all of CavanKerry’s books, I wish I could afford to own the press’ entire output-to-date, but I can’t. Of course, I would not have sub­mit­ted my man­u­script to CavanKerry if I did not like the qual­ity of the work they pub­lish, and I remem­ber read­ing through more than a cou­ple of their books while I was doing the mar­ket­ing research I needed to do when I decided to give up on play­ing the book-contest-roulette that has increas­ingly become the pre­ferred way for poets in the United States to try to get their first books pub­lished. That kind of read­ing, how­ever, is very dif­fer­ent from sit­ting down with a book of poems and giv­ing the poems the time they need really to sink into you, giv­ing your­self the time it takes to let a poem’s lan­guage do its work. That’s what I’ve been doing with these six books over the past few days now that I own them, and, the more I read, the more I find myself hap­pily hum­bled to know that my work and these books are on the same list.

The rea­son I bought these six books in the first place is that, later this month, CavanKerry will be gath­er­ing all of its authors together, or at least all of us who can make it to New Jer­sey on that day, so that we can talk about the press, our own mar­ket­ing efforts and share some of our work with each other. When I read in the invi­ta­tion that we would be read­ing to each other, it sud­denly struck me that I did not know the work of any other CavanKerry author, that I remem­bered only a few of their names, and I felt guilty for this igno­rance. I wanted, when I met other CavanKerry authors, to be able to say some­thing mean­ing­ful to them about their work, and even though it is pos­si­ble that none of the six poets whose books I bought will be at the meet­ing, at least I will have made the effort. (I know there was no rea­son for me to feel guilty, and I cer­tainly am not imply­ing that any­one else in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion — CavanKerry author or not — should feel guilty; it’s just the way I am.) More to the point, now that I have these books, I can offer here, and in suc­ces­sive posts, at least a par­tial appre­ci­a­tion and cel­e­bra­tion of the work they con­tain, first because the books deserve to be appre­ci­ated and cel­e­brated and, sec­ond, because it gives me a chance to share how good I feel know­ing that my work is in their company.

So, for no rea­son other than it was the first one that came to hand when I started read­ing this morning, I want to start with Andrea Carter Brown’s The Disheveled Bed. This is from the Fore­word by Brooks Haxton:

Most mem­o­rably in this col­lec­tion, Brown records the dis­ap­point­ment and courage of a woman unable to bear the chil­dren she and her hus­band want. With­out hedges or illu­sions, the poems present the cru­cial details of clin­i­cal vis­its, mis­car­riage, mourn­ing, and the per­sis­tent dif­fi­culty of sus­tain­ing and recon­struct­ing one­self, one’s mar­riage, and the world.

I’ve only read so far to the end of the sec­ond sec­tion of the book, so I only a par­tial view of the process that Hax­ton writes about, but what I found myself most admir­ing as I read through the first sec­tion, which deals pri­mar­ily with the clin­i­cal details of infer­til­ity treat­ment, specif­i­cally the havoc that the drugs wreak on a woman’s body, was how Andrea Carter Brown finds lan­guage over and over again that uncov­ers in the nam­ing of an expe­ri­ence the beauty that inheres in the expe­ri­ence itself, no mat­ter how painful or sham­ing or frus­trat­ing or what­ever the expe­ri­ence might be. This is from “Ultrasound.”

They direct you to a dark­ened room. You climb

up on a paper-covered table, slide your butt
to its edge, spread your knees. The doctor

enters, slips a reg­u­lar Ram­ses over
the probe that vibrates with sound you can’t

quite hear, squeezes clear jelly from a tube
onto its quiv­er­ing tip.

In “IUI (a.k.a. The Dou­ble Rainbow)” — IUI stands for intrauter­ine insem­i­na­tion — Brown writes about the process of being insem­i­nated with her “husband’s/characteristic pink semen” while lying beneath a rain­bow mobile on which

                                              Red breeds

yel­low and blue, which them­selves pro­duce
orange and green, pur­ple and ultra­ma­rine,
rep­sec­tively, each repro­duc­ing in turn

except the last which, with­out issue is larger,
a coun­ter­weight to its fer­tile sibling.

Up till this point, the speaker’s con­scious­ness is wrapped around her­self and her body, as indi­cated by the third per­son ref­er­ence to her hus­band, but then the rain­bow spin­ning above her head sends her fin­gers to find

…the turquoise tad­pole strung between turtle

and frog on the fetish neck­lace I’ve worn
for luck which you car­ried home in a sock
to sur­prise me for my birthday.

That switch to the sec­ond per­son address of her hus­band is a beau­ti­ful moment in the poem, reflect­ing the speaker’s sud­den aware­ness that she is not alone in her predica­ment, that she is loved, and that even though “lying on the exam­i­na­tion table” makes it “hard to believe/life can be made,” there was a time when she and her hus­band saw their “first dou­ble rainbow…one/spectrum nes­tled within another as we do in bed/before sleep.”

It’s tempt­ing to go on quot­ing from these poems, the pre­ci­sion of their lan­guage and rhythms is so com­pelling, but I am going to stop there and say, sim­ply, that Andrea Carter Brown’s The Disheveled Bed deserves your atten­tion. I hope you will buy it and read it.