Barnburner by Erin Hoover
Barnburner by Erin Hoover (Denver, Colorado: Elixir
Press, 2018)
Erin Hoover’s premier collection, Barnburner, is a
lot to take in — like a lunch buffet when you’re used to packing a salad from
home. These poems, mostly longish, mostly narrative, are personal ones, and
they cover a long span of the poet’s real life, from her infancy in the shadow
of Three Mile Island, through adolescence and adulthood and ultimately
parenthood.
The neat trick of the collection is that while it’s both
narrative and personal (interviews with Hoover bear this out), the reader never
gets a sense of really knowing the speaker. We know some stories, or some parts
of some stories, but we can’t say we have a relationship with the storyteller.
What does come through is a strong consciousness of class, one
that is aware and carefully considered. The first poem in the book, “The Lovely
Voice of Samantha West,” is a prose piece that begins, “I once worked at a call
center. We weren’t allowed to talk, only script-read, and I thought: Can’t they
automate this?” It turns out they could, and Samantha West is the name of
the automated voice that can’t quite replace live operators because her uncanny-valley
verisimilitude is too off-putting to those who are targeted: “Not eager to be
fooled, people recoiled,” writes Hoover.
Instantly in the book, we understand Hoover’s bona-fides.
She has worked in a job where she had to clock out to pee, and where “Every
three hours on the dot I stood outside in a designated area and burned the
high-nicotine cigarettes I’d bought.” In the end, the speaker quits, and she
can’t explain why. The reader understands, though, after being walked through
the life of a call center operator.
Another class-conscious poem is “The Evacuation Shadow,” a
term, Hoover tells us in the book’s notes, that refers to a phenomenon where “far
more residents will voluntarily leave the area surrounding a nuclear power plant
following an accident than government officials adviseor plan.” This poem shows
the speaker as a child near Three Mile Island, “pinned to the evacuation /
shadow my parents didn’t // have the means to leave.” The Appalachian setting
of the poem is compared to the meltdown site of Chernobyl, Ukraine, where “backyards
are seeded with dolls / and basketball decades // flat.”
The poem concludes,
But everyone
has to live
somewhere, so like adults,
we children pretended
the cornstalks
could be fine after
that, the river
clear to its
depths, still good
to swim. No choice but
to count
our own bodies as safe
to roam
inside, protected
in our skin.
It tends to be the poor who suffer in disasters, human-made
or otherwise; since leaving requires means, often the poor are left to make do.
Another poem that is threaded with issues of class and
privilege is “If You Are Confused About Whether a Girl Can Consent,” which is
based on testimony of Emily Doe in the case against Brock Turner, the
privileged Stanford swim team member who raped an unconscious fellow student
and got a six-month sentence from a sympathetic judge. The title and epigraph
of the poem connect to give nearly a full quote from Turner’s accuser: “Future
reference, if you are confused about whether a girl can consent, see if she can
speak an entire sentence.” The power differential in rape is compounded by the
privilege of the perpetrator.
These are more than personal poems; they are poems of
broader witness, and reading them is a clarifying and empowering act. Hoover
says it best in “Reading Sappho’s Fragments”:
It’s convention now
It’s convention now
after the tragic
event to say, There are no
words.
But I believe
there are always
words. There are,
after all, bodies
and they
deserve words,
anybody’s and mine.
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