The “parasite” in the titular poem that haunts Hadara Bar-Nadav’s The Animal Is Chemical, selected by Jericho Brown as the winner of the 2022 Levis Prize in Poetry from Four Way Books, is no animal. It’s not even human. The “sick” and “CARNIVOROUS” infestation that urges to “keep families / in / a controlled room” since “[c]hildren / must be fully consumed / during the hunting season” is more than an ailment of the body. It is a fever in the mind consumed by the book’s dual themes of family history of the Holocaust and the pharmaceuticals used to treat the physical and psychological symptoms related to that inheritance.
The parasite is less infection than possession, suggests the opening poem, “Dybbuk,” referring to a figure in Jewish folklore that signifies possession by the dead in the body of the living:
Here, the mind can take you
in pieces—
my long Semitic nose
and curly hair like a calligraphy
of barbed wire.
Someone is trying to burn the girl
out of me. (3)
This specter serves as a lightning rod for a knowledge felt firsthand through the absence of the bodies listed in the book’s “Notes.” Starting here is as much orientation as incantation: while the events of history are indelible, the act of reimagining them through language and image may be the only exorcism we get.
How to speak of the decimation from which you came other than to transform the language you use to utter it? Framed as an origin story in the last two lines of Dybbuk, “A myth in which a god sets us / on fire and then sets us free,” the poems let loose in language “Gurgling, guttering,” “Groping for underlanguage, underworlds in a muted register//Words underneath, inside, closer to the dust in the back of the throat,” as in Parenthesis. The moaning and howling are meant to alleviate the pain of having to imagine—since one does not know—what happened, to whom, and how many. Compounded new words make new meanings, then ask, as if speaking for multiple generations, “Can you understand this?” before answering, “All language is a whisper reborn, breathscraped, bloodscraped, air hunger.” This language is gestural, exposing the movement of the mind in a Gertrude Stein-esque and Paul Celan-ish contortion to speak an experience that feels both Jewishly ubiquitous yet unspoken.
What keeps the elasticity in the language from unraveling into formlessness, are the rhymes (at times internal and slantish), rhythms, syntactical play, and line breaks, as in “The Singing Pills”:
Each of my dead
holds a torch
inside me, bubbling
up my throat,
lungs gummed
with creosote.
I reverse into the early
morning blankery
when the pills still
sing me to sleep,
deep in the blue milk
of oblivion,
all of my wicks
for the moment unlit.
Rhymes tumble across sentences and clauses meant to contain them, alternating as they flow down the page to open spaces for new images, new riffs, and new language, while the heavily stressed rhythms measure pace and closure.
The linguistic acrobatics fly highest when stripped of punctuation to indicate syntax or parcel out rhythm, which occurs in the last two lines of “The Singing Pills”: “I am an ordinary I / unfree from history.” In the syntactical slippage created by the lines break in absence of punctuation, I hear both “I am an ordinary [adjective] I, unfree [adjective] from history” and “I am an ordinary [noun], I unfree [verb] from history.” The mind exists in simultaneity, a different kind of open-ended (non)closure. That is one pleasure. The other pleasure of the syntactical departure is having been invited to participate in the speaker’s momentary psychological release from history’s weight.
Another release from the intensity of individual experience is the formal detachment in the book’s erasure poems. Borrowing from the supplemental texts of medications, these reimagined poems enact their own versions of what it means to think of disappear as a verb. In “[Life eats breath],” the halting lines breaks and offset words tell us that what patients want from medicine is the very thing they do not get:
You
may
not
get
well.
You
may
not
go
home. (65)
The tragic fact of this impossibility of closure may be what creates space in Bar-Nadav’s imagination to include within the erasure poems a place in the conversation for the words of those who made it so. Even as “Pleas[e]” reshapes the multiple voices of those prosecuted in the Nuremberg Trials for their participation in medical experiments on Holocaust victims: “I was competent responsible surgical / I was // a pile of rubble”), we hear the voice of the poet’s direction having the last say. Here is a poetics that transforms language in order to reclaim meaning, including from those responsible for the meaninglessness they created.
When I opened the book, I was already wondering how this could end. What kind of conclusion could Bar-Nadav pull from such rupture? So imagine the pleasure when I realized I was asking the wrong question. In alternating sections, the book’s cyclical composition affords no conclusion. There is no Odyssean arrival since there is no linear journey. Time, Bar-Nadav insists, is always present, the past still prevalent and pervasive. As if to say, “It was and is and will be.” At the center of a complex network of mirrored and refracted subjects, images, and language, is not a climax but the silence of “Black Screen (Kidney Ultrasound),” an elegy for three generations of females: a lost relative, the self, and a child that was not to be. This central silence feels excavated from moments of psychological explosions and their implosive responses that resound through the rest of the book, as if a plot of land that had been dug up to form a ravine is then refilled to cover the damage. When I imagine the book’s shape, all I can see is the ravine at Babi Yar whose stadium size is described in “Wolf Child” as “The earth’s jaw / opening” (9), where earth has also been unearthed and backfilled, an endless cycle that once initiated, for its victims and for the reader, cannot rest.
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