Throughout the book, Bolden’s poems challenge received ideas of how to talk and think and feel about the body, particularly the medicalized, traumatized female body. The speaker in the fiercely passionate “I Was Told Not to Write About the Body” responds to those who’ve instructed her “not to give the body / a name,” “not to think // of the body,” “to be more / positive,” and “to see the body as light” by asserting her own deeply felt experience against these platitudes:
I was told I shouldn’t write
about the body or the deaths
that grayly hung by claw & upside
down inside & so I made the body
a clearing & the deer who stood
inside. I made the body a deer’s mouth.
I tasted the leaf greenly chewed inside,
I felt the velvet of its nose & ears &
cheeks & I felt the cold intrusion
of bullet, the raw shock & silence
of the rifle, of the stop, of the story
I was not supposed to give the body
I was not supposed to name.
The speaker’s knowing, here and in other poems, is personal, intuitive, empathetic, and female. The hunted deer offers her a way to understand and articulate her physical self and to counter the banalities that surround her. At the same time, the deer is no metaphor, but a living being the poet sees with compassion and clarity, a fellow creature whose food the speaker tastes and whose shock and grief she shares. The speaker understands that being unable to control the language she uses to name her body and her story is akin to being “stopped” as the deer’s life is stopped. And the ability to employ her own language to narrate the story of her body is life-affirming in a profound sense. This book, in its inventiveness and integrity, reminded me of the power of poetry to confront and question received language—language we are, in so many other contexts, not encouraged to question—and to reveal the essential truths beneath it.
In poem after poem, Bolden returns to certain images: the house in particular, and also gardens, the night sky, rain, and other varieties of weather. The way she circles back to these images, turning them over, giving them to us again and again from varied angles, recalls the idea that we come back to certain themes multiple times over the course of our lives, but each time in a new way, a way that enables us to see from a different vantage point. Perhaps, ultimately, this process allows us to heal. Bolden’s poems know there is “no other way out of away,” no other way to hope for any transformation but through relentless investigation. As she says at the end of “The Night Office,” “What could my body practice but opening. What / could I do but wonder out towards more light.”