Indigo Ink Press, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9828330-1-8
Trade Paper, 92pp, $16.00
Indigo Ink Press has published a flip edition with the poetry of two contemporary women poets in one volume. The poems of Chella Courington and Kristen McHenry complement each other through language and theme. Chella Courington’s collection is titled Paper Covers Rock and features a cover with a blindfolded girl who looks as if she can be cut out like a paper doll. She is surrounded by blackbirds, bare trees, and swirling ground cover. On the flip side, Kristen McHenry’s title is Triplicity: Poems in Threes. The cover has a bright red heart surrounded by thorns and punctured by three ornate swords against a gray background with white wavy lines. Both poets are focused on female struggles, which they approach with a clear sense of sexuality and irony.
The young girl on the cover of Courington’s book holds her shirt open so blackbirds can fly into her chest. This image encapsulates the themes of sexuality and the body, which thread throughout the poems. In “I See He Sees,” a child notices a boy looking at her mother as the mother’s skirt lifts, “wondering why/she doesn’t/hold it down.” The poem is one stanza with short lines, giving it the flying movement of the skirt. There is also an undercurrent of seeing as the boy looks at the mother who is naked under her skirt; the girl looks at the boy looking at the mother, and then the boy looks at the girl. It is the gaze of the voyeur who has the power over the object, and the boy uses this sexual power in the final lines: “winking/before the light/turns green.” In this poem, there is language repetition, alliteration, and pronouns rather than names. A sensitivity toward language and how it can be used to bring an idea to the reader is an essential aspect of Courington’s poetry.
She looks at burgeoning sexuality in the poem “Thirteen,” where “Anna Claire and I” who become “Ruth and Naomi” swim together in adolescent exploration. The poem is written in quatrains that contain powerful images: “I float on her fingertips,” “uncloses my eyes with her tongue.” Although the poem ends with “We don’t say a word,” the poet’s understanding of this early sexual experience illuminates emotional depths in clear language.
Courington has a wonderful sense of humor that surfaces in poems such as “Immaculate.” The persona is warned against sleeping with a boy before marriage. If she does, then the Virgin Mary will come and “snatch me away.” She forgets her mother’s words “when I kissed Tony.” She also learns that “Cousin Lynette did whatever/she wanted—the Virgin never messed with her.” The poet’s articulation of how accepted ideas about sexuality impact the individual through the iconic image of the Virgin Mary is both true and humanly funny.
There are several poems in this collection that wrestle with complex familial relationships, bringing to the surface painful realities. In “Queen’s Bird,” the poet uses the connection between bone china that belonged to her mother and her mother’s bone ash after death. The alliteration is carried on with “bronze urn” and “songbird glazed in blue,” connecting the mother to the daughter even though there is a desire by the latter to escape. The poem is in couplets representing the mother/daughter dyad that ultimately cannot be severed even in death as the daughter raises her mother’s cup: “my lips where once were hers.” A companion poem about the father is “Jeopardy,” where the father is a tough man who “began to sag.” His decline is symbolized by his watching the show Jeopardy, a double meaning, with a glass of whiskey.
Courington’s poetry is centered on struggles of the body, in the family, and with health issues. She ends the collection with a brilliant poem about a mastectomy: “there’s a crater in my chest.” There are long lines, lots of alliteration (“mass materializes,” “fingers fumbling,” “deadly darts”) and thrilling descriptions ("lustrous filaments,” “white-beaded nematocysts") that take the reader into the depths of loss and leave one with the haunting image: “iridescent purple stings the night.”
In Aristotelian thought, the triangle is the symbol of perfect harmony. This sense of three has come through the ages, from religion to nursery rhymes, to indicate wholeness. Kristen McHenry constructs her collection using seven section titles with three poems in each section to explore surprising aspects of our society and the struggles of being female. In her poem, “The Acrobat,” from the section Voices From Vegas, she writes: “With each new page, I vowed/to master symmetry so God/could catch me in my perfect moment.” Her poems in each individual section play off each other through theme and language to deepen our understanding of the subject. The first poem in the section Bad Romance is titled “Spock: A Romance in Quotes” and shows McHenry’s wit and use of irony. After Spock meets the woman in the poem, he states: “It is curious/how often you humans manage to obtain/that which you do not want.” Spock acts as a foil to the romantic with his logical observations. The second poem in this section is “The Adulterer,” where “Happiness is a carry-on/crammed with scarlet panties.” The third poem is “The Prostitute,” which explains problematic romance to an even greater degree when it ends with a jarring image: “as serpent/swallows sow, as night/tars the sun.” McHenry builds our sense of what bad romance is through her accretion of images.
The poet is involved with body image in the section Body Shock. McHenry’s hard edge is present in these poems, particularly in “Apology,” written in couplets and tercets, where she deals with the body in pieces: “The uterus was/as usual confused.” The metonymy of this poem, as the poet slowly enumerates each part of the body, shows how difficult it is to integrate the various physical and ultimately spiritual aspect of the self. The poem begins with the body “demanding redress” and ends with the sentiment of partial success: “There remains to the day/a long and awkward silence.” The following poem in this series also has to do with fragmentation and is titled “The Ultimate Weight Loss Solution.” This poem shows the tension between “Woman versus Body,” and how it plays out in our daily lives: “We are legion,/us would-be murderers.” McHenry is fearless in her condemnation of oppressive societal norms and often uses shocking images to bring her point to the reader: “Kiss the knife. Pare off the excess.” The third poem in this group is “A Questionnaire For Determining Those Deserving of Care.” The series of questions with which the poem begins are intrinsically judgmental and show little connection with real caring: “Was your cancer caused by a poor mental outlook?” “Have you ever made an uninformed choice?” The poem continues with short, piercing questions that corrode self-esteem and ends with finding the subject “unworthy, due to the misfortune/that you have quite obviously brought upon yourself/with your reckless disregard/for all that is clean, holy, and God-fearing and virtuous.” The irony of pairing care with these types of questions shows a strident inhumanity so prevalent in today’s culture.
Both Courington and McHenry explore our frailties as human beings and help us to understand how we can face life’s difficulties through the language of poetry.
Barbara P. Lovenheim has published poetry in a Handful of Dust, Scapegoat Review, Tygerburning, Hazmat, and others. She has also published reviews and critical essays. She teaches in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies at Nazareth College, Rochester, NY.
