Poem366: “A Live Thing, Clinging with Many Teeth” by Kolleen Carney Hoepfner

A Live Thing, Clinging with Many Teeth by Kolleen Carney Hoepfner

A Live Thing, Clinging with Many Teeth by Kolleen Carney Hoepfner, Indiana: Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2019

I just finished A Live Thing, Clinging with Many Teeth by Kolleen Carney Hoepfner, and it was a fascinating immersion into a world I both did and didn’t recognize.

The chapbook appears to be composed of one long poem, broken up into numbered sections and separate, untitled pieces. These parts of the poem have lush, imagistic language, but they don’t aim to answer any questions; they just offer a tense, worrisome scene with plenty of rather terrifying details.

In the book, a woman seems to be locked up in a place that isn’t clear. She seems to be alone, but then she doesn’t. There is a feeling that time is passing and she is losing hope, but still paying attention to her senses and trying to find ways to bolster her resolve:

The best she could do

was remember how fucking close

she had come

to escape

It’s easy to imagine the frustration that is the closest thing to hope one can have in a nearly hopeless situation. Writes Hoepfner,

She had underested the wind,

the scent of some beloved

but long-lost master

      (or, on the other hand,

shivering and wakeful,

                  the blood-smell

                  of a dream full of teeth,

   hungry but not yet desperate).

At this point, the literal was mostly lost to me (whose master? And who smells the blood?). The best plan of action I’ve found when lost in a poem is to lean in and accept its premises, while trusting that something will happen—there will be explanations, or the sense of the poem will be enough, or you’ll re-read it and everything will click. And this book captured tension better than any I could remember, from poetry at least; it read like a thriller, but with the deeper emotional resonance of a poem.

Something happens midway through the book and involves blood, and it feels like a clue to the literal:

Until clotted, blood

      was as slippery as oil. […]

Her agenda was not complicated:

a quick escape

unconsciousness               death

The growing feeling of fury:

She could feel

that hot, electrical tingle

like a live thing

clinging

with many teeth

There is real drama in the sparse syntax, and as a reader, I’m rooting for this woman, and wondering who she is and what kind of trouble she has found herself in.

All was made clear on the acknowledgments page, which explained, “This collection is comprised of found poetry, using Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game as a source.” In Gerald’s Game, as I recall, a woman’s husband dies after chaining her to a bed during sex, and she is left to figure out how to escape. I won’t spoil it for you, but the slippery blood is a relevant plot point.

What fascinated me about this collection was how accurate and familiar it felt to anyone who has experienced sexual violence and domination. King’s source material was not relevant to the deep appreciation I felt for the emotional truth and the tense quasi-narrative. Hoepfner is the artist at work here, and she is masterful at it.

Poem366: “A Bag of Hands” by Mather Schneider

 

A Bag of Hands by Mather Schneider

A Bag of Hands by Mather Schneider, Studio City, California: Rattle, 2018

It’s interesting to thumb through a chapbook that won a prize I myself was vying for. I open a book like that not with jealousy, but with hope. I really want a book that beat mine for a prize to be good. Being an also-ran to a bad book would feel pretty rotten.

The good news is that it’s pretty hard to deny the merit of A Bag of Hands by Mather Schneider, a 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize selection. It’s terrific! And that’s a relief.

The Rattle Chapbook Prize is a particularly nice award. It’s big money — $5,000 at present — and the winning title gets distributed to Rattle’s 7,000 subscribers, according to its website. Additionally, the author receives 500 copies of the chapbook, and that’s pretty generous, too.

Schneider’s book fascinates from its unusual title to the first glimpse of the cover, which features original art by the author — a hand (Schneider’s?) seen resting on the frame of a car door through the side mirror. It’s a familiar enough scene, but strangely disorienting, with sky reflected against parking lot pavement and scruffy turf and an inset mirror offering a slightly different view.

That’s what the poems offer, too — an unusual perspective. Many of these are from the point of view of a cab driver who loves a woman from Mexico but transports people who look down their noses at immigrants. In “Consequences,” a woman’s boyfriend reports that 54 people have died in the last month crossing the border from Mexico into Arizona.

The other woman looks out the cab window

and says,

Well, I’m glad.

The man looks at her with something

that is almost horror,

almost human.

It’s a surprising link that the speaker of the poem has with this man, joined as they are by their disgust with the woman’s racism. “There are consequences,” she concludes, feeling fine about the death of so many.

“A Bag of Hands” is another poem that addresses the immigration issue. This poem is about 12 severed hands found in a bag in Jalisco, Mexico. “I’ve stolen things. Hasn’t everybody?” the speaker of the poem asks while considering the hands, removed, perhaps, for that infraction.

He considers the hands of his passengers, and of others:

Some of them are beautiful and smooth

as buckeyes. Some of them are so calloused they cut

you when you shake them. Some of them cup

the sunlight.

Imagine the hands

that held the thieves down, the hands that raised

the machete, the hands

that fell.

“Smooth // as buckeyes.” That’s quite beautiful to me, and such a different way of looking at hands. That kind of insight is found throughout this small collection, which deserves to be in the world, doing its careful and beautiful work.