What I'm Reading: Baer, Chatti, Gatwood

Last spring, when Margot was a little baby and we were home together for the first part of the sunshine months, I started reading poetry. I wanted to read something that I could feel…and matched my attention span. So, poetry. Sometimes six words, sometimes six pages. Pick it up, put it down. Read it, skip it, circle back to it. It was perfect for me then, and now I pick up some poetry almost as often as I pick up a novel, which is pretty often. There’s poetry for all tastes, and if you don’t know where to start, open the book and start reading; if you don’t like it, put it back on the shelf and try another. Sometimes a poem can be read with a glimpse of the eye; it’s the message, the lesson, the emotion that will linger.

Over the last few weeks I read (and re-read) a trio of poetry collections by different authors which all target parts of the female experience in vastly different ways. In the book Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, the character Sunja deliberates something her mother repeated often: A woman’s lot is to suffer, and that sentiment is the connection between these three poetry collections. They are all about suffering, but also love, unity, compassion, and friendship.

Leila Chatti - Deluge

Olivia Gatwood - Life of the Party

Kate Baer - What Kind of Woman

It says, God has plans for you. / It says, I didn’t say they were good (from, “Angel”). Chatti is in her early 20s when diagnosed with a tumor which causes her to bleed almost constantly for two years, which is the basis of Deluge. The collection is sometimes her firsthand recollections of her experiences, with doctors, family, boyfriend. In this vein, the most memorable poem for me was “The Scare” where she describes a memory of a late period vs this moment later when a clot leaves her emptying, still something / like empty.

Chatti brilliantly infuses entomology into her poems (so interesting!) as well as quotes and inspirations that guided these poems, and perhaps how she grappled with what has happened to her. Flipping through the pages of her book today, I’m drawn into each page, each poem, sometimes for the format, but because her words draw me in with their gentle open-faced honesty.

So if you asked me again,
twenty-three, I’d tell you the worst thing
you could be is not a woman but
barren, the industry shut down and the parts
missing, malformed. And I’d tell you the shame of it:
feminine failure, its ache
a reminder — at the center of the tumor
ballooning, like hope.

from,“Mother”

Many poems reference or feature the virgin Mary, and have religious themes which culminate in the 11-page poem “Awrah”, it’s almost like a research paper of poetry; it’s incredible. While Chatti explores the way male doctors in particular don’t take her seriously or recommend less effective procedures because of her age or appearance in many previous poems, she kind of deep dives into the topic here by combining religious, medical, and word studies into her experience. She explores the way women can be ignored or seen as shameful, and also not considered whole by men.

In Life of the Party, Gatwood continues to explore the inhumanity that women experience at the hands of men. This collection focuses on the glamorization of true crime, the sexualized experiences women are subjected to, and how women survive.

I read that
[runningtrailsparkinggaragessouthcarolinabedroomsvacations]
are the [sixthfourthsecondfirstninth] most common place for women to be murdered
is something I tell her often to statistically justify my need for company in benign places.

But there are cameras, she says, pointing to the white globes of God’s eyes
perched in every crevice, always looking in my direction.

That won’t stop someone from murdering me, I say. It’ll just tell you who did it.

from, “Sound Bites While We Ponder Death”

These poems are harder - about abuse, murder, violence, murderers - narrated often by fear, some by strength. Some poems are written in reference to specific murders of women; many reference Aileen Wuornos, who I had to look up (then, horrified by this women’s history, vowed to never ever watch the movie Monster starting and produced by Charlize Theron because never ever should that woman’s life have caused anyone to profit except possibly women and children’s protective programs). The end of the collection is this sort of daydream in which women no longer need to fear men, where “All the Missing Girls are Hanging Out Without Us”:

let this be the folklore. not in a field.
not in a river, not mouth half-open,

knock-kneed under the tall grass
behind the baseball field.

not in a park or at the bottom of a drained pond,
not in their boyfriends’ trunks, their boyfriends’ closets

or between the floorboards
in his house. they are alive

but not in a basement, not scanning
a grocery store bulletin board

for a picture of their young and gone face. no, the girls
are having a contest: who can catch the most tineola moths

from, “All the Missing Girls are Hanging Out Without Us”

And this makes me think of Kelly Dwyer and sitting with her outside The Garage a month before her birthday, talking about our love lives, sharing the juiciest tidbits, and joking about 50 Shades of Grey. Yes, I think I agree that a woman’s lot may indeed be to suffer. Life of the Party digs into women suffering the violence (sexual, physical, verbal, emotional) that occurs throughout our lives, the violence we turn our eyes from.

(Did you know when you bait a deer its called a violation but when you poison a girl it’s called a date.) (from “College Boy”.) I’ve dogeared no less than a dozen poems in Baer’s What Kind of Women because it was clearly written for my friends and me. These are private pains, moments, meant to cut to the quick and embody the life of woman now, and then, before the years rolled by, and my how they have rolled! It’s the suffering of love, childbirth, judgement, oppression.

We are half drunk, half destroyed. Nothing
left but blood and bone. Still we surface—
fold into each other like paper cranes. Her,
like a long-lost lover. Her, a cool and
healing balm.

from, “When Uncle Brian Asks if We Sit Around and Burn Bras”

Women share the experiences of oppression which cause shame, doubt, and the undervaluing of themselves or their gender. What Baer explores in What Kind of Woman is the self reclaiming womanhood, absorbing some of this suffering into #life so that we readers can nod our heads vigorously and say YES, THIS. She finds truth in the fact that lies are told, marriage contains love as well as cruelty, that the reality of women may be to suffer but also to find the joy in-between in order to survive it.

For now just remember how you felt the day you
were born: desperate for magic, ready to love.

from, “For the Advice Cards at Bridal Showers”

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Baer, Kate. What Kind of Woman. New York, NY: Harper-Perennial, 2020. (This is an ARC)
Chatti, Leila. Deluge. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2020.
Gatwood, Olivia. Life of the Party. New York, NY: The Dial Press, 2019.