She'll Find The Sky by Christy Ann Martine

    Sometimes when I read poetry collections, I open to the back section to read the thank yous and acknowledgements. I don’t know why I have that affectation, but when I did this for Christy Ann Martine’s She’ll Find the Sky, I found statements not like “Christy Ann Martine is the publisher of three previous collections and has her work in Fiddlehead, CB2, and The Malahat Review” but instead a passage that read “celebrities around the world have shared her poetry on their social media accounts, including Julian Lennon, Misha Collins, The Jacksons, Mena Suvari, Good Bones star Mina Starsiak Hawk, actress Amyra Sastur, and TV personality Matt Johnson” (25). I have never seen anything like that before, except, perhaps, when Arrested Development’s Tobias Fünke’s acting reel included a section called “Famous People I Know.” Both cases have a dubious notion of celebrity and both make me feel awkward to experience. Perversely, though, the tactic worked—it did make me want to know just how low this book could go.

    And it really is bottom of the barrel.

    Hopefully Christy Ann Martine never reads my review; I would feel knowing terrible knowing she put her heart and soul into self-publishing this book and then being panned by some nobody know-it-all.

    The reality is, there is a market for this book, but I am not that market. I won’t bother rehashing my problems with instagram poetry in any level of depth, but in short I am very critical of any poetry that, rather than creating an experience for the reader, simply employs stock greeting-card phrases to allow readers to self-insert any actual content. The poems do not create an experience of love; they rely on readers to know what love is like already and then read a poem and say, “girl, same!” Again, this is me speaking from some sort of ivory tower-adjacent structure when I discuss the unpracticed hand that has big feelings but doesn’t have the craft to shape them into an experience.

    These problems manifest in the recycled similes and metaphors throughout the collection. Everything is rain, everything is fire, everything is stars, everything is flowers, everything is butterflies. Reading the poems individually may not yield the same effect, but when you read them all in succession (it took the length of 1 dog walk + dinner making to read the 254 pages of this book), you start to get the sense that all these published poems are drafts for a poem that never gets written. I present here a few ad hoc selections, but plenty more abound: “Love is a soft rain, / gently falling / on my heart, / nourishing my soul / so it can grow” (42), “She’s in the clouds, / heavy and dark, / waiting to fall like rain” (164), “I want to live / in a world / where love falls / from the sky like rain, / washing the pain / of the past away” (168), “My mind is dark / and filled with pain, / like the dark sky / before the rain, / I need to let go” (175). When so many things are like rain, rain stops being like anything; it’s a placeholder for meaning, an idea devoid of content.

    If you feel that I’m cherrypicking lines from poems to help lampoon Martine’s book, an important detail to note is that each of the quotations above is an entire poem. One thing to be said for the collection is that it is a page turner: I’m already turning the page as I start each poem since the poems are nary more than four lines. That may be why many of them feel like false starts. For example, in “Dreams of a Full Moon”, Martine writes, “The roar of the ocean / holds secrets of / moonlight lovers. / Love rises with the tide, / it lives within the waves” (51). There’s a reasonable premise of intrigue there: the idea of roars that overshadow secrets and the hush of foam rendering moonlight lovers hazy could be developed into something engaging, but there just isn’t enough to latch onto.

    A significant portion of the poems can be classed as what I would refer to as ‘advice musings’ (and what Christy Ann Martine refers to as “Little Life Sayings” in Chapter Ten) rather than experiences. It’s the telltale use of the imperative that should serve as a warning to any non-Instagram poetry aficionado: “Keep searching for the colors / when everything turns gray. / Even in your darkest moments / a brighter day awaits” (“A Brighter Day Awaits” 202), “Dance with the waves, / move with the sea. / Let the rhythm of the water / set your soul free” (14). This book is at its most, as the kids might say, certified cringe, is when it leans into the advice poems. In the last section of the book, suddenly the titles of the poems are missing and instead the audience is given a post-poem title in the style of Rupi Kaur. I suspect there may be a historical / cultural precedent for consistently putting the titles of poems after their namesakes instead of before, but here it just seems to be a kind of weird derivative technique. What makes it truly embarrassing, though, is that the titles are simply the advice the poems are providing. Let me give you an example. Here is a poem: “When life becomes so loud / that I can no longer / hear my own thoughts, / I need to turn down the volume / and tune into my soul, / so I can remember who I am / and where I am going.” Its title follows in italics: “your inner voice is always speaking to you, but you need to listen.” What, exactly, is the difference in the tonal register, word choice, or even the length of the poem and its title? It appears that the only difference is that what is presented as a poem has line breaks while the title follows a conventional left-to-right margin approach. Another example: “You can’t receive the gifts / the present moment is offering / if you are living in the past” (243). The title of the poem? “You don’t have to hold on to the pain forever, let go.” I am left perplexed by these titles and this approach. Is it the case that the titles are meant to clarify the “Little Life Saying” provided by the poem, as if it were not immediately obvious? It would be one thing to title “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” “It would be wise not to dwell too much on the past, lest ye become an old man looking for consolation in a universe in which you’ve had no impact”, but here it just makes me blush to see a life lesson parading as a poem followed by a banner that says “hey! Here’s exactly what the poem just said!”. Martine’s approach presents itself as a draft leeching off a different draft.

    While I was reading the book, my eyes were rolling hard, but as I write this review I actually feel a pain in my chest at how harsh I feel myself being. Please note that the book is, in all likelihood, sincere, and I want to value Martine’s personal experiences as an author. She is a survivor of neglect and abuse, and I in no way want to diminish the severity of those experiences. As an aesthetic object, though, I feel this book misses the mark. In the section “The Dark Years,” Martine offers a trigger warning for abuse, neglect, and depression. I commend her for showing compassion to her audience, though I don’t personally see these as being particularly triggering; because the poems are quite vague (allowing audiences to self-insert), I feel that whatever triggers arise are triggers you yourself have placed into the poems, rather than the poems themselves being triggering. For instance, the poem “Your Words Couldn’t Break Me” reads: “You tried so hard / to shatter my spirit, / but a soul full of love / can never be broken” (149). It skims along the surface; it intimates an idea (though is it a lover? a parent? a destructive teacher? a mean internet reviewer?) but it doesn’t create, in me, a visceral reaction through its incisiveness or descriptive qualities.

    I am well aware I’m not the target audience for this book. I’d like to be at least a little generous and say that there is a demographic that will love these poems, likely more casual readers or people beginning to get into poetry. If this book helps them get their feet wet, I am in full support. [I should confess here that my entrypoint to poetry was Charles Bukowski and, honestly, I’m not sure most of his stuff would be any better and it would certainly be more problematic.] The cynic in me, though, thinks that the vagueness is a marketing ploy to capitalize on a pre-critical audience (cf. Bo Burnham’s song “Repeat Stuff”). Poems like “Everyday Hero” speak to this concern: “You don’t have to be brave, / you just have to keep trying. / You don’t have to be strong, / you just have to keep going. / Maybe your superpower / is refusing to give up, / even on your weakest days / when you feel you’re not enough” (204). Granted, I prefer to read things that make me hate myself for being such a useless garbage bag of regret, but the compulsion towards self-aggrandizing feel-goodery doesn’t, to me, feel authentic or sincere. Maybe someday I’ll get to a place of unqualified self-love but when I do, I don’t think it’s going to come from a poem like this one. The most redundant platitude peddler is “Extraordinary Moments”: “I haven’t had / an ordinary day / since we met. / Each moment / spent with you / has been / nothing less / than extraordinary” (59). Don’t let the line breaks fool you; the poem is saying that the speaker hasn’t had an ordinary day because the days have been extraordinary. That’s it. It’s poems like that that make it feel like a cash grab of false fire and staged swoons (also if poetry is a cash grab now I really need to rethink what I’ve done with my life). 

    I’m coming to the end of possibly the meanest streak I’ve ever had in a review, and I want to end on a poem that I found interesting, though I am confident it’s interesting to me unintentionally. The poem is called “The Secrets of the Forest” and it reads as follows:

When the soft winds blow

I can hear the trees whispering.

Their leaves rustling

as they share their thoughts

with the universe.

They talk about the sun, the sky,

the people that roam the earth.

They say we are all one. (20).

Now here’s the thing. At the heart of this poem is a paradox. Let’s accept that “we are all one.” I appreciate that sentiment and largely believe it to be true. But, if everything is one, the premise of the conversation falls apart. Why would trees talk to one another to say “we are all one”; the need to assert the ultimate unity of all things necessarily entails a division. If everything is truly unified, there would be no need nor any way for formerly individualized trees to speak to one another; they would already be sharing the same experience. Likewise, there would be no distinction between the sun, the sky, the people—there would not be different appellations for different entities with which to refer to one another, much less so in the absence of a human ear [the very distance of which subverts the premise—if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does the person not also fall?]. I’m likely overthinking the metaphysics of this piece, but that was the poem that actually made me stop to think.

    I used to have a professor whom I very much admired and he would often use a phrase that was something like, “If a job is no experience necessary, there is no experience gained.” Essentially, it was about how if the barrier for entry (in this case to a text) is nothing, then it won’t provide much when you leave it. Essentially, that’s how I feel about “She’ll Find the Sky.” 

    I’ll bring this review to its natural conclusion here. I’ve exhausted myself with complaints, and I feel quite guilty for offering such a negative review to a book that may very well do good in the world. I hope it finds its audience and that my naysaying does not diminish the joy other people find in this book.

    Happy reading, with apologies to Christy Ann Martine.