(review by JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp)
In the spring of 2015, amidst the finalization of a merger between Southern Polytechnic State University and Kennesaw State University, a colleague at an English Faculty meeting told me about poet and associate professor, Jenny Sadre-Orafai. A few days later, I introduced myself to Jenny and knew right away that I wanted to read her work. The result was and is a desire to bear witness to her journey.
In the spring of 2015, amidst the finalization of a merger between Southern Polytechnic State University and Kennesaw State University, a colleague at an English Faculty meeting told me about poet and associate professor, Jenny Sadre-Orafai. A few days later, I introduced myself to Jenny and knew right away that I wanted to read her work. The result was and is a desire to bear witness to her journey.
Jenny
Sadre-Orafai’s Paper, Cotton, Leather
is a collection bound by grief, courage, and craft. For those unfamiliar with
the title’s context, each textile corresponds to the traditional anniversary
gift for the first three years of marriage. This journal of difficult truths;
likewise, is a cumulative collection of shadowy interlopers and lost days gathered
while the speaker finds meaning in starting life anew.
What
might surprise readers is that unlike the chronologically linear title, this
collection begins at the end. In the first poem, “In Our Memory,” we suddenly
appear graveside during the eulogy for the speaker’s marriage. Civilization is
measured not by evolution, but by the contrast of nature in its pure state
(“wind/and climate and animal/and plant and ocean and land”) and love (“an
uncivilized romance) in its distorted one.
The book’s tense tone is firmly
wedged between the denial of emotional depth (“You will say: we didn’t have
real/history before we met) and the evidence of its weight in the lines,
I’ve never made it this far
out in the waves, this far
out in the heart. The hurt
is bearable most days.
This
type of tight syllabic thread appears often in Sadre-Orafai’s narratives. Most
notably, poems such as “It Might Pull You Under,” “Distant Heat,” and
“Forecast” contain both visual and metered closed-fisted punches. “Distant
Heat,” in particular, is a visually stocky poem that leaves shrapnel in its
wake.
Distant Heat
My
thunder splinters
you in
three, thrashes
you
fantastic, scatters
your
blooms or bones
across
this ground in
the dry
season. Here is
what’s
left for anyone
who
could want to root
your
skinned stems,
eager
apologies.
Between
the slanted rhyme and alliteration, the reader is presented with an image of
that same primal power from the first poem, but this time the intended “you” is
reduced to the dust blown from one’s hands after crumbling leaves.
Although
Sadre-Orafai’s integration of craft is most evident in the villanelle,
“Theories Are Fog,” the book’s courage lies within what I liken to the fifth
and final stage of the Hero’s Journey: the reintegration into society. Her
poem, “The Dive,” exemplifies this stage best.
The Dive
I
relearn how to press my body
against
other bodies. My slick flesh
like
scales, like fish tail, hums across
men’s
spines during afternoons.
I teach
my mouth words like sunshine,
Cupcake.
The mouth, once a fist,
now
can’t help but smile when it wags
these
out, a loud chorus learned.
My legs
remember how to braid
themselves
in with other legs,
hairy
and sometimes freckled,
that
hear the gloss of my calves.
In the
first and third stanzas, the reader gets the sense that this is how it feels to
emerge from the muck of grief – self-conscious and deliberate. It’s as if the
speaker has been practicing how to breathe before remembering that we just do.
Men’s legs feel a certain way against a woman’s
skin, and the synesthetic image of an experience that is at once tactile,
visual, and auditory reminds us that the primal will override the cerebral when
we finally let our guard down.
Once
this is accomplished, it’s on to the language of the light-hearted. We know
this is no easy task. Solemnity does not tolerate whimsy; it does not want to share
its space for fear of not being taken seriously. The speaker writes, “The
mouth, once a fist, now can’t help but smile…” and our communal relief is
palpable. She’s made it back.
Jenny
Sadre-Orafai is the author of Paper, Cotton, Leather and
four chapbooks. Recent poetry has appeared in Linebreak, Eleven
Eleven, Redivider, Thrush Poetry Journal, PANK, Rhino, The
Bakery, Sixth Finch, ILK, iO: A Journal of New American Poetry,
and Poemeleon. Her prose has appeared in The
Rumpus, The Toast, Delirious Hem, The Los Angeles Review,
and South Loop Review. She is co-founding editor of Josephine
Quarterly and an Associate Professor of English at Kennesaw State
University.
JoAnn
LoVerde-Dropp received her MFA from Spalding University in Louisville,
Kentucky. Her poetry has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Public.Republic.net,
and Bigger than They Appear: Anthology of Short Poems. She is a Lecturer of
English at Kennesaw State University and serves as secretary of the board of
directors for the Georgia Writers Association.