Unearthing

She addresses this “drift” most directly in “Corrigenda for ‘More Raw Data,’” citing a poem in one of her previous collections, Placebo Effects. It seems she got the story wrong in this previous poem, likely through no fault of her own—the poem “Icebox,” which precedes “Corrigenda” in Letters from Limbo, includes the image of Beaumont’s mother “cornered in the kitchen” as Beaumont questions her about what we might lately call the “alternative facts” Beaumont had previously been told regarding her grandmother’s death. It seems now that the line “A woman dying in childbirth / in the twenties—one less / immigrant in Fishtown” from Placebo Effects must be amended to “A woman dying post-partum / in a state asylum—one less / immigrant in Clifton Heights.” That revision of “in the twenties” to “in a state asylum” perforates the vagueness of the previous narrative irrevocably. Even the colloquial “Fishtown” is now clarified as Clifton Heights—there will be no further euphemism in this story, and we see clearly what has left Beaumont’s mother “cornered” for so many years.

Beaumont incorporates the asylum’s medical records of her grandmother, Anna K., a Czechoslovakian immigrant who came to the U.S. at age 20, leaving behind an illegitimate infant, a desertion which may or may not be the source of her breakdown following the birth of her fourth American child. Perhaps this distress was compounded by the loss of one of these four American children to “kidney trouble at age 2,” as described by her husband in “Adam’s Anamnesis.” Beaumont does not speculate, leaving us to piece together this tragedy of poverty and loss almost entirely without metaphor or explanation. At one point, quoting from the “patient’s log,” she focuses our gaze on a seemingly insignificant detail: the request to cut Anna K.’s hair “for / the betterment of her health,” which must be approved by Anna K.’s husband and witnessed, in a telling moment of institutional bureaucracy,

Again, we immediately recall Beaumont’s mother in her kitchen “intently wiping the icebox,” with a “dishcloth [that] went / round and round and round.” If we missed the allusion to Lady Macbeth initially, we can’t help but see it now, yet we feel only pity for the grown “ten-year-old daughter” unable to wipe her loss and guilt clean.

As indelible as Anna K.’s story is, Beaumont doesn’t leave us there but rather opens herself up to scrutiny in the final section of the book: why trouble these histories in poems? Is it merely prurient curiosity, an admission that we “love our skeleton far too much to turn back” or do such investigations provide a measure of closure, even equanimity (“Our Skeleton”)? Beaumont herself seems unsure, arguing both sides: