The line reads as emblematic of Skaja’s book Brute: poems. Examining Skaja’s biographical entries reveals an academic background in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and that influence is clear in the telling of these poems. The poems orbit a number of related issues—domestic abuse, eating disorders, misogyny, sexual assault—and it is clear that “To tell it once” is not enough.
The poems in the collection, in my view, were proficient and often had well-wrought motifs (at their best when speaking to one another), but the collection as a whole didn’t particularly excite my enthusiasm.
That said, I want to focus on a few of the pieces I found most compelling. What is interesting to me in Skaja’s work is the way in which images and narrative are paired, giving the audience a taste of both. One can gather hints of connected stories between poems, most notably those involving relationships; several of the poems refer to an interchangeable ‘he’ that lets them read as a sustained exploration of the bond. These glimmers of narrative provide the audience a useful foothold for poems that can sometimes read more abstractly.
My favourite example of a balanced poem are the opening stanzas of “Figure of Woman Coming Out of a Wall”:
That this name I loved belonged to me. At least.
“Figure of Woman Coming Out of a Wall” continues with the speaker visiting her senile grandmother, who “doesn’t always remember our name” (71) (I love how the ‘our’ unites them despite their clear disconnect). The grandmother’s reminiscences are replete with similarly specific moments that seem too real to be fiction, like “watching their father burn down the garage for the insurance money.” The mix-ups are gutting: “She thinks it’s my aunt’s birthday, that we have eaten golumpki / & set out the cake knife & we’re waiting for my grandpa, dead in 1987, // to rummage through the cabinets for the good floral plates.” Like other poems in the collection, this poem has some clever turns of phrase and imagery that capture the tone of the collection. In this case, she refers to how “March / has melted five blizzards down to floods” and how “There’s a parquet star on the floor. The moon is losing blood.” She continues, “When I cradle the skull of a vulture to my cheek, I remember / How once I was near-bride at the not-altar, how she sewed me a blue marriage quilt” (72).
Individually, these images build a heart-wrenching scene and, taken on their own, are striking. Where the collection fails to land, for me, is that a lot of the poems seem to have a mix of metaphors that don’t evenly mesh with one another. The result is that the poems’ indistinct foci make them more difficult to latch onto. Rather than using metaphors to leverage one another, they are set up to battle for dominance.
Of course, the broader sociological issues in Skaja’s poems are important and demand action. Skaja isn’t as abrasively polemical as some of her contemporaries, but the ethical impulse of the work is certainly clear. The poem “Girl Saints” stands out as a notable example in that respect. The poem almost certainly responds to the misogynistic undertones of religious discourse and the madonna / whore construction that so frequently traps women. “Girl Saints,” however, does not spend the majority of its time on brash deconstruction. Instead, there’s a surprising amount of rich metaphor and wordplay: “we were already stained in glass. // A circle of black flies biting / our arrival. Scales scraped off a fish. // Starved girls folded at a line from Leviticus” (23). A few lines later, Skaja writes, “Bring us the coat-check ticket for our eyes” (23) which I found such a mysterious and delightful phrase, anachronistic and decontextualized. The most explicit identification of the dilemma comes in just a few lines: “If ghost, if whore, if virgin – same origin story: // because X was a face too lovely, Y was a corpse in the lake” (23). I suspect the X and Y double as a wink to chromosomes, with the Y chromosome being the one that gets killed off in this framework.
Let’s return to the poem which lent its opening lines to the start of this review since “To tell it once is not enough”. In “Dear Katie”, we see an elucidation of central key themes: there’s the religious “I have a hundred holy objects, everything looked upon, to break”, the temporal meditation “Time will pass, time will pass me, attaching mile-marker threats // to every causeway”, issues with mental health and eating disorders like “You are the only one who ever asks me Are you eating?” and the challenges of gendered expectations like in the line “when did I begin to choose this type of man who loves to ‘protect’ me // from himself?”. The fact that so many of these different motifs are placed into the same poem is perhaps representative of the internal competitions within poems—or, more generously, representative of the intersectional approach in Skaja’s work. The tangible lines of “Dear Katie” are then supplemented with the more oblique lines that are more evocative, but perhaps draw the focus somewhat: “Remember the dead dog as we found on the bridge road. A coyote, I said. / Raised as I was near a cemetery, I always assume some authority // over the departed. Stray magic. Lies about the natural world // comfort me, I admit. Like if a tree feels something / when another tree is fucking up her life. I believe in patterns. Shapes” (25). Personally, I prefer the more obscure lines, especially when taken from their context. The idea of “stray magic” in such close proximity to a reference to a dog is a clever layering, for instance.
Cleanth Brooks, an unlikely critic to reference here, has a book called The Well Wrought Urn in which he talks about how poems are like well-wrought urns where everything cohesively fits together and that no piece of a poem can be changed without changing the whole. To me, Skaja’s poems may be well-wrought, but not in the same sense. In many cases, I think the base of each poem is well-constructed on a foundation of sociological critique and is then painted with its more lavish, if obscure, flourishes. It’s almost as if the stylized flourish could be lifted and the core of the poem would remain, for better or for worse.
If you’re a fan of societal critique and social justice poetry, Skaja’s work nicely elevates the mode, even if it sometimes doesn’t quite hit the spot for me. Skaja cites her influences in the form of epigraphs before the different sections of the book, and the one that seems most clear to me is the reference to Sylvia Plath. Plath and Skaja are joined in a project of exploring deep issues, particularly as they pertain to feminine experiences of the world. This is an overly verbose way of saying: if you like Plath, read Skaja, too.
Thus concludes my first review in quite some time. Hope it was worth it!
Happy reading!
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