Poem366: “Nursewifery” by Ruth Williams

Nursewifery by Ruth Williams

Nursewifery by Ruth Williams, Durham, North Carolina: Jacar Press, 2019

Ruth Williams’ elegant chapbook Nursewifery, from Jacar Press, is as clever and innovative collection as I’ve seen, and I hope that my introduction to it here might lead others to discover how special it is.

My mother was a nurse and my two sisters are, too, and I’m interested in the profession, though I was never in any danger of becoming a nurse myself. (Once, as a teenaged candystriper—which, admittedly, feels like the first line of a pornographic novel—I had the embarrassing experience of fainting on the job from witnessing something a little too intense for me. In a family of nurses, I ended up in the gift shop, in the very hospital where my mother was the night nursing supervisor. I’m sure she heard about my experience, but I can promise she didn’t hear it from me.)

Among the majority of the people in the world who are not nurses? Ruth Williams. But she is a feminist scholar with an interest in this woman-dominated profession, and she is also seemingly a student of history. The role of combat nurse captured her fascination acutely enough to produce this outstanding small collection about military field nurses from, seemingly, the era of Florence Nightingale—the Crimean War and thereafter. The nurse whose voice offers up the poems in Nursewifery wears a pinafore and works alongside horses, but the exact conflict in which she serves is unstated, unless I missed a clue somewhere.

The most fascinating thing Williams does is her focus on the different types of stitches nurses use to suture wounds. Some of the poems bear the names of stitches as titles—titles like “Vertical Mattress Suture,” “Locked Suture,” “Corset Plication Stitch,” “Far-Near Near-Far Modified Vertical Mattress Suture” (no, really …), and more.

It turns out that our means of repairing ripped or cut skin offer potent metaphors. She explains each stitch in an epigraph taken from the Medscape website. The quote to start “Deep Tip Stitch” offers a powerful example:

The deep tip stitch provides longer-term support than the traditional corner stitch and improves alignment of the tip with the sides of the closure.

The unnamed nurse persona who voices each poem identifies with this stitch:

We thought ourselves exceptional,

though we knew we were merely women

wearing uniforms to distinguish us, not as individuals,

but as a type of caring, a calm blue

stitch.

Williams continues in this voice, saying, “We pulled together // what could not otherwise be touched,” adding that ability was the nurses’ “special softness, // our elegant way of aligning the world.” I offer a lot of this small poem, but I’m really fascinated by how Williams takes something so prosaic and makes it in to such a powerful symbol. The life of the nurse is exactly like the description of the deep tip stitch, and Williams proves it.

As I savored this chapbook, I took time out to hit YouTube, where there are quite a few stitching demonstration videos, most of them featuring thick, fatty squares of fake human flesh, sort of Caucasian-ish on top and yellow underneath. As I looked up demos of each of the stitches Williams named, the same calm male voice explained how to execute each suture, and a video showed a hooked sewing needle manipulated by forceps. Throughout, he peppered some of the same jargon used by Williams; for instance, the first poke of the sewing needle through the skin seems to be called “the bite”—another strong metaphor.

Williams has much more than a good concept going for her, though. This is also a powerful collection, with the suture poems “stitched” throughout the book, which offers a daming critique of war and the harm it does.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is called “The Suitor,” which recalls a first dance with an early beau of the battlefield nurse. It continues,

Later, you’ll

find him again

on the table

red weather

between you.

This is a small poem, but it packs a dramatic wallop, and damage from war being referred to as “red weather” is highly arresting to me.

Williams is the author of two other collections, so her work shouldn’t be hard to find. I recommend you read her work—stat.

Poem366: “Tales from the House of Vasquez” by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland

Tales from the House of Vasquez by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland

Tales from the House of Vasquez by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland, Studio City, California: Rattle, 2018

I love getting lost in a book of poetry, partly because they’re all so different. Some work their magic through flawless reasoning or beautiful words. In Tales from the House of Vasquez, Raquel Vasquez Gilliland’s particular magic is … magic, actually—and it makes for compelling reading.

There is the magic described in the poems—a specialized understanding carried down through generations of women—but there is also the incantatory quality of the work itself that helps to effect the numinous quality of this chapbook.

There are fourteen poems in the collection, all beginning with “The Tale of …” (“The Tale of the Serpant,” “The Tale of Kitchen Spirits,” etc.). The tales are family stories that involve mothers and aunts and grandmothers, and through them, the intelligence behind the poems comes into her own.

A prevalent symbol in the collection is the eye. Some of the Vasquez women have four of them, two in front and two in back. “The Tale of Madness” explains the story; in it, a bear visits one of the speaker’s ancestors, and the ancestor sang a song that pleased him. In exchange, the bear offered her the ability to see.

Pero señor, Inez said. I can already see.

This sort of seeing opens your other eyes.

The ones in the back of your head.

The bear explains that the back eyes offer a different kind of sight. The ancestor accepted the gift, but as the bear began to open one of her back eyes, the moon emerged and interrupted the process, and the bear could not open the second eye. The bear tells the ancestor, “One of your back eyes will see what is behind / you. And the other will see what is within you.”

The bear continues,

The madness will gather under that closed eye.

And it will be passed on to your daughter,

and her daughter, and her daughter,

until one of your daughters will not bear

it any longer. It will nearly kill her,

but she will pry the other eye open

with her bear hands, and she will see

the spines of stars.

It’s a powerful prophecy that begins to play out in the book in fascinating ways through tightly linked, mystical poems.

In these poems, madness is held in awe. “The Tale of Desire” explains that madness comes from terror:

                  … The fear that causes your spirit

to break into pieces and run into all directions,

one piece under the crook of the lily leaf,

another over the eyelid of birch.

What is so striking to me as a reader is how these fantastical, imagistic explanations of a woman’s magic seem so accurate. I believe every word of what is presented as a kind of fairy tale.

Something is happening beneath the surface of language in these poems, so that “The Tale of Kitchen Spirits” feels almost like an answer key when it says,

If you listen close, you can hear

her talk to the spirits. Sometimes

she even prays aloud, even though

the spirits have always preferred

fingers and bone.

Tales from the House of Vasquez is a small book that has big things to say, and I’m happy to have stumbled across it. The poet’s bio notes that she has another book to her credit, Dirt and Honey, and I plan to hunt it down and read it in one sitting.

Poem366: “Rue” by Kathryn Nuernberger

Rue by Kathryn Nuernberger

Rue by Kathryn Nuernberger, Rochester, New York: BOA Editions, 2020

Reader, you’re in for a treat. I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advance review copy of Rue by Kathryn Nuernberger, forthcoming from BOA Editions in April, and it’s stellar work, fascinating from cover to cover.

All poets have their thing — that aspect of poetry they do best. I’m always excited by poets who can lean hard into an image and make it dance in unexpected ways, and I also love poets who have a musical ear for language and sound. But Nuernberger’s particular skill is rhetoric, and it’s fascinating to see how each poem’s argument unfolds. She is brilliant, of course — well educated, well read, a careful thinker — and her poems come together in such smart ways. As a bonus, they’re well crafted, and imagery and sound considerations are very much on point. But the best thing about these poems is seeing a sharp mind at work to solve a rhetorical problem.

Although I’m going on and on about the rhetoric here, don’t think for a moment that Nuernberger doesn’t get personal. Within the bounds of these arguments, the speaker of these poems talks about her workplace politics (and I absolutely love that she writes about this topic), or she calls out a townsperson who is too touchy-feely at the coffee shop, or she indicts an obstetrician who treats her roughly during childbirth.

This latter example is found in the poem “Poor Crow’s Got Too Much Fight to Live,” which begins with a crow struggling with a trapped foot but then takes surprising turns to tell the speaker’s birthing story. There’s a Catch-22 in the whole childbirth scenario these days; every baby book tells us to formulate a birth plan, something many doctors will flatly ignore, and some will openly mock, with the attitude that they’re the doctor, and they’re going to focus on getting the baby safely into the world.

in “Poor Crow’s,” Nuernberger writes about a doctor who seemed to react to her birth plan with malice. Writes Nuernberger,

                                                      That guy

jammed his hand into me hard and without warning,

I think because he was offended by our conversation

about my birth plan, which was boilerplate stuff

about avoiding drugs and letting my body run its course.

I’d like to prosecute him, for myself and even more

for everyone else, but it took me months to understand

what he had done and why and by then it could so easily

be time telling the story instead of truth. …

I know so many mothers who have part of this story to tell — a birth plan mocked and ignored, with no chance that it will be put into effect — but the story told here, of a doctor physically hurting the speaker, goes much further. I find myself cheering for Nuernberger at the end of the poem, which does all but name this doctor:

I’m sorry, other people he might have or still yet

hurt, but I’m not so naively idealistic as to think

any good could come of saying to the public that I was

assaulted by an OB/GYN in his office in Logan, OH

in May 2010 and I’m willing to testify to that.

I grew up about 60 miles from Logan, as it happens, and I know there aren’t a lot of OB/GYNs in an Appalachian town of 7,000, so I also know how bold this poem is, and I am here for it.

Nuernberger is also a delightful nerd, sharing her crush on Carl Linnaeus, who invented the system we use to classify and name living things. It makes sense that a science-minded poet would appreciate this historic figure — a guy who named the largest mammal, the blue whale, “Balaenoptera musculus,” or “the mouse whale,” Nuernberger points out. She basically shows how adorable he is to fellow nature-lovers and word nerds, but then she finishes by pointing out a problematic aspect of this figure — that he classified people by color. “What do you / think?” she asks the reader. “Can we love him anyway? Did we / ever really even in the first place?” This is the sort of thoughtful probing found often in the long, detailed poems in the book.

The argumentation in the poems is the high note for me, but let me be clear: Nuernberger also has beautiful, lyrical moments, like I encountered in “Dear Reader, I’ve Been Preoccupied Lately by My Own Private Business.” Nuernberger describes a silent movie with philosophers who travel to the moon (“Le Voyage dans la lune,” I believe):

Their moon, when they got there, was full of can-can girls.

Their moon wanted a fist in the kisser.

Their moon wanted to pull off those stockings.

Their moon was orbited by a comet made of fire, not some accuracy of ice.

Ah, I love “some accuracy of ice” in this context. Even Nuernberger’s lyricism is brainy, and that’s delightful to encounter.

I suspect you can preorder Rue right now — and I suggest you do. I’ve lingered over these poems all day, and I am convinced.