Passing Through Humansville
by Karen
Craigo
Sundress
Publications, 2018
ISBN:
978-1-939675-78-1
77
pages
_________
Karen
Craigo is
the editor and general manager of The Marshfield Mail, a weekly
newspaper in southwestern Missouri. She is author of the collection, No More
Milk (Sundress Publications, 2016), and the chapbooks, Someone Could
Build Something Here (Winged City, 2013), and Stone for an Eye (Kent
State/Wick, 2004). Her poetry, fiction, essays and journalism are widely
published, and she maintains a blog on writing, editing, and creativity, Better
View of the Moon. She is the nonfiction editor and former editor-in-chief
of Mid-American Review and the interviews editor of SmokeLong Quarterly.
I've
never met Karen Craigo in person. We're
friends on Facebook, and I have been a fan of her poetry ever since I read her
chapbook, Escaped Housewife Tries Hard to Blend In, published by Hermeneutic
Chaos in 2016, but now out of print. I reviewed her poetry collection, No
More Milk on this blog in March 2018. —Karen L. George
__________
Review of Karen
Craigo's Passing Through Humansville
Karen
Craigo's Passing Through Humansville explores, celebrates, and at times mourns and
resists what it means to be human through her particular lens of curiosity, honesty,
playfulness, urgency, tenderness and reverence. These poems take us inside a home,
a car, a school, a church, a hospital, a coffeeshop; in the woods, a butterfly
house, a cow pasture, at a concert, an art museum, and within reimagined Biblical
stories. She examines the duality and mysteries of being human—layering images
and scenes of beauty, connection, nurture, creativity, and the holy pinned
against vulnerability, worry, violence, loneliness and loss. The book is dense
with emotion and understanding. I’m going to concentrate on the poem’s ideas
and images surrounding the human need to connect—the give and take of nurturing
and being nurtured.
The beginning poem, "Meditation With
Cat and Toddler," sets up the recurring dynamics of the complexities these
poems examine:
And
here I sit with a body reluctant
to
bend, a brain that won’t still, a cat
that bumps
me for attention, and a toddler
who will come, who has punched
me in the eye for pure love.
We
see a mother trying to nurture herself by meditating, but her toddler and the
cat both want attention. The image of the cat bumping the mother perfectly
mirrors and heightens the image of the toddler punching her “for pure love.”
The
second poem, “Before He Was Born, I Sang Night Songs,” is lush with images of connection
and the sweet, primal, holy intimacy of breastfeeding. She describes it as “the
latch, firm, parasitic, drawing the nectar / down.” The word “parasitic” effectively
echoes the “bump” of the cat, and the “punch” of the toddler. In the first
poem, the “constant rumble / of om” echoes the sounds this mother and her
son make in their connection: “the soft constriction of throat” as the baby
latches onto her breast, and how he “still vibrates with my humming.” In the
center of the poem is the mother’s breathtaking admission: “There is nothing on
this sphere I won’t pull to me, / won’t sing to in the dark.” She speaks of how
she too is nourished by feeding her son: “the last moment I am everything, his sweetness
/ and his sound.” In a later poem, “The Art of Rhetoric,” the mother and son are
described with this beautiful image: “this baby beside me, / curled against my
back like the comma…” The poem ends with the following stunning lines:
there is nothing more convincing
than
the whispered swallows I hear behind
me
as my son works his bottle in his
sleep.
Each nearly silent gulp makes a claim.
In
“On His Brother’s Second Birthday” a second, older son is “inconsolable” because
he “misses the baby,” his brother, who is now two years old. The mother reveals
she too misses the baby, and comforts the older son, herself, and us by the reminder,
“our younger selves / don’t go away—they live on, / deeper and deeper within
us.” She goes on, in a kind of dual direct address, including the reader in
this intimate, moving scene:
…We must believe
an infant resides in all of us.
Come. Sniff the hollow of my neck—
a scent so soft you’re not
even certain it’s there.
In
the playful “Spelling Test Friday” the mother nourishes her son by helping him
to learn: “I spar with words / like a pugilist,” and she in turn is fed by the knowledge
that “he gets it,” understands “he’s going to do fine.” In “Avocado” she talks
about the ripeness and fertility of her body— “the nurturing flesh.” “Good
Night in the Blanket Fort” shows a mother who promises to sleep in a type of
nest her and her son built with pillows and quilts, “walls” to “protect us from
blue night.”
There
are repeated images of breath and breathing in this collection, which fit into
this theme of nourishment. When we breath, oxygen is inhaled into the lungs,
moved into our blood that carries it to sustain our bodies, and the carbon
dioxide is expelled through exhaling. In the poem “Tasseomancy,” the mother and
son connect through sharing coffee, and they thirst “to know / what the future
holds,” ending with the image of her son staring into her coffee cup, “close enough
/ to smell the other’s breath.” In poem 5 of the series “Ten Sources of Light,”
a baby under a jaundice lamp is addressed with the following tender lines:
You, little loaf,
are almost risen. How
warm you’ll feel
against me. I can’t wait
to breathe you in.
This
collection also celebrates our human need to connect with friends and siblings.
One poem recounts a childhood memory, a circle of girls in the woods, joining
their drops of blood to become “Scab Sisters,”—“it was holy, we were dryads rejoining
the wood.” In “Total Knee Replacement,” the poet refers to the body and the operation
her sister has undergone, but in the following lines, she suggests vital
aspects of love and our connection to others:
We come to rely on the hinges—
how they lift us and let us down,
soft.
Most love requires collapse.
We fold and unfold into the other,
or wrap the self in the self.
There is such essential wisdom in
the above lines, and in the poem’s closing lines, that again express the
healing of her sister’s knee, but at the same time speak of life in general in a
reverent, unforgettable way:
try
to remember:
this
is how we rise, and how
we
leave, and how we pray.
The poet also explores the nourishment
of love exchanged between spouses. In “When We Find a Hurt Mouse,” the husband “is
kind enough / to bear the injured to the yard, / then with one stomp save it /
from hours of suffering.” What a powerful image of violence as a means to
deliver comfort. She goes on to say “not all gentleness / is conveyed in a caress,”
and to describe watching him “stroke the patchwork squares / of the giraffe’s
neck, receive / a blue tongue the length / of his arm, offer it a bit / of
grain” – such a gentle, compassionate connection, which implies each (the man,
the giraffe, and the wife observing) is enriched. In poem 7 of the series “Ten
Sources of Light,” the husband is portrayed in such a loving manner as he gets
the coffeemaker set up at night for his wife’s morning coffee:
…each
night
unfolds
a filter,
measures
grounds
with
a wooden spoon,
adds
water and comes
to
bed.
The poem ends with the lovely image
of how the next morning the “green dot” of the coffeepot “is just / enough light
to help / me find my way.”
Imagery of light, as in the above
example, is also threaded through these poems. Light as a metaphor for energy, connection,
protection, and hope. In the collection’s center, the ten poems in the series “Ten
Sources of Light” contain different examples of light: the glow of a town seen
on a hill while driving at night; a reporter watching the eclipse and asking
others what they think of the sun; seeing the aurora borealis; flicking on a cigarette
lighter at a Pink Floyd concert; and with her father, viewing fireflies light
up the night sky. There are also contrasting images of life’s dualism, its darkness,
in the poems—instances of when we can’t connect with others, and when we can’t
nourish ourselves or others as much as we’d like.
Besides connection between humans,
this collection contains poems in which the author reflects on how we connect with
the natural world. In “Speleology” she refuses to kill the spider above her
pillow, which she describes exquisitely as “eight eyelashes affixed / to a
speck.” The poem “Filibuster” retells the memory of a male teacher that makes
her stand each day during a civics class in the garbage can with her nose pressed
to a chalk mark on the blackboard. The poem ends with a stunning, redemptive
image:
I
start to get
the
sunflower, whose every
instinct
makes it stand
with
its tall quorum,
who
together turn
their
backs on the dark.
This collection also delves into connection
and nourishment through spirituality. In “I Come to the Garden Alone,” she tells
a friend she terms “a better Christian” that she doesn’t believe in heaven or
hell, but instead feels “a river / of intelligence courses through all things,
/ and we join it when we are lucky // enough to die.” She describes this flow
of connection in the following way:
We
are paddling through otherness,
and
the molecules that enter her mouth
on
a gasp came from somewhere,
and
maybe once were in me, in the barista—
in
cave people, street preachers, nuns.
In the poem “Mary of Bethany,” during
a church service, a woman rubs the bald spot of the man she loves. The poem
ends with the beautiful observation:
And
isn’t that God, touching us
where
we’re most exposed,
loving
even our emptiness,
those
places soft with down.
Besides
the hopeful moments portrayed in these poems of connection and nourishment,
there are also moments of unsatisfied hunger, emptiness, discomfort and
disconnection. There is such heartbreak in “For Brenna <3 Ernie” when a
mother recreates the moment her son hands a picture he drew of himself and a
girl named Brenna to that girl:
When he gave it, he broke
into grief, racking sobs,
eyes closed in shame.
He loves her.
The
poem reveals with such tenderness the details of the picture he drew:
…Consider
his vision, two, standing,
so happy and plain
in their britches. It is
simple. There is nothing
easier; the beauty
hurts him, each one
dignified and glad,
small arms open
to possibility
in the twin flags
of their rectangle pants.
The
poem “Inventory” talks about not having enough money to pay the bills. The narrator
asks the question, “What is the world’s crime / that it should be forced to pay
/ and pay again?” She continues:
…I know the feeling.
Credit cards, rent, car insurance.
Just going to the mailbox
makes me numb. And then
I look around, see a clearcut
where my life ought to be.
The collection’s title poem, “Passing
Through Humansville,” references an actual town in Missouri, in which the
narrator of the poem “slips[s] into and out of …both coming and going.” Besides
the literal journeying in a car through a town called Humansville, the poem
suggests the journey of a human lifetime. The driver passes through fog, which
she depicts as “the layer of white like an old lady’s hair / spread out behind
her in rapture.” This creates such a whimsical picture, and to me, suggests the
idea of the old woman being “raptured” to the hereafter. The poem continues: “Why
not? / The oldest vessel can still hold / / a drink, or else we’d call it a
shard.” This image of the woman’s body as a vessel infers she can still nourish
and be nourished—that there’s still life in her. The ending stanza is so full
of the duality of being human—living and dying:
And
maybe I’ve stepped on the ground
where
my ashes will light.
Maybe,
unknowing, I’ve danced.
The last two poems of the collection
talk about the nourishment a teacher provides for her students, who appear to
be learning English as a second language. In “Walking Papers” “students are
learning / where to put the stress, what vowels / to flatten or round, how to
hear / the difference in consonants…” It felt to me that this teacher is also
speaking of language as a means to connect and nourish us, similar to song. The
poem ends with the teacher’s compassion for her students, “those stonemasons
and carvers, / painters and metalsmiths, / heading off into the unknown,
everything they own heavy / against their shoulder.”
In the collection's last poem,
titled "The Movement You Need," the teacher again delves into the
components that make up the English language:
The
key, you know, is emphasis. English
is
a stress-toned language, and we listen
for
the punch, in a word, in a sentence,
and
that extra oomph, that little flex,
is
all we need to make sense of a thing.
And then she sings “Hey Jude” with
the students who she says are “visitors here, / people who have been
misunderstood / by cashiers and taxi drivers, / the lilting mismatch of Arabic,
Polish, / Yoruba, Japanese.” The teacher begins singing “Hey Jude” and that has
made all the difference—they are connected and nourished:
…but
today in class
we
layer vowel over vowel, and we sing,
no
hesitation, all voices present and clear
from
the first “Hey, Jude.”
The poem and the book end with such
a note of unity and hope, incorporating some of the words of the Beatles’ song so
beautifully into the poem’s flow of meaning:
Don’t
you know that it’s just you,
hey Jude, you’ll do, and we do know,
we
feel it, we punch each key word
to
drive it home, into our heart,
then
we can start to make it better.
The last line is, of course, a line in
the Beatles’ song, but by not having it in italics, it feels as if the teacher
is saying that the sentiment of this song is being “driven home,” into these
students’ and the teacher’s hearts at one and the same time, to become a part
of them, and that this connecting to other human beings through language, through
song, can begin to make this a better world. I believe her.
Karen Craigo’s Passing Through
Humansville is threaded with tenderness and reverence, vulnerability and honesty.
These poems sing with intimacy, and a powerful voice of gratitude and hope
about all the ways we connect in our experiences as human beings. The moments
this poet creates, the ways she speaks to the reader, will nourish you at every
turn.
__________
__________
Karen
George retired
from computer programming to write full-time. She lives in Florence, Kentucky, enjoys
photography and visiting forests, museums, cemeteries, historic
towns, and bodies of water. She is author of five chapbooks, most recently the collaborative ekphrastic Frame and Mount the Sky (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and two poetry collections from Dos Madres Press: Swim
Your Way Back (2014) and A
Map and One Year (2018). You can find
her work in The
Ekphrastic Review, Sliver of Stone, Heron
Tree, and Valparaiso
Poetry Review. She holds an MFA from
Spalding University, and is co-founder and fiction editor of the journal, Waypoints.