When I think on phrases with which I can tag this present moment, ones that anchor myself to others’ creations while acknowledging the nonsense that blinks along daily like check-engine lights on our lives’ dashboards, I always return to the phrase coined by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert as they titled their 2022 absurdist, multiversal, comedy-drama Everything Everywhere All at Once. Climate crises in likely and unlikely topography, the fallout of a Certified Rotten U.S. presidential election, expanding global atrocities obviously facilitated by the United States’ visible hand: it’s all there, everything, all at once, you get it. It’s just that we seem to have found ourselves in whatever universe existed inside that box which may or may not have held Schrodinger’s cat, one in which everything is and isn’t at the same time, one that demands action but constantly seems to withhold info. The Fates lack quality control these days, and the one with the scissors seems particularly prone to twitching.
It is through a reverse-prismatic process, by which Hannah Bonner acknowledges and preserves this current age of anxiety while distilling it into lyrical liquor, that I met and became acquainted with her debut collection of poems Another Woman. Bonner writes from a “Split infinity.” “Again, I am at that juncture,” says the speaker in “Pink Light.” Broken into six cohesive sections, Another Woman is a striking and timely addition to the apparent movement of poetry collections situated ambiguously between a traditional binary of lyric and narrative verse: books that pace up and down the aisle, forging compromises between the requirements of both iambic ambling and linear character development. Through poems running the gamut from epigram to persona to full-page monologue, Bonner precisely observes, contains, and in every instance expands the “small spasms of a life.”
That phrase in particular—“small spasms of a life”—encapsulates much of the collection’s underlying tension: the reductive lenses we all apply to our own lives confronted by the realized tremors that add causality to cacophony. In Another Woman, language is affirming and dissenting, realized and surreal, and coming and going, though mostly coming. Its lines navigate across placelessness and place, from Black Mountain to Arkansas to Old Man’s Creek to undefined yet sensory locales where stars surge “cellular through grasses” or hang “like little notes we tack up / in order to survive.” Bonner’s lines consistently find themselves at the intersection where nursery rhymes and kōans meet: “Dust up the dirt road, / and all the way back down.” Even the most well-defined figurations are notable for their invisibility: “how black the cords that shape the hem / like shoreline without moonlight.” Yet despite this constant oscillation (this everything everywhere etc.), Bonner’s speakers exist in an undeniably tangible—even edible—world, in which flowers twist into fruit and fingers inevitably end up in mouths.
The comfortably loose narrative tumbling from poem to poem is one that sustains equal levels of clarity and uncertainty; it’s an account of otherness, in which the main speaker orbits a marriage like a satellite: “I became the other woman / gradually, then suddenly.” But Another Woman shouldn’t be relegated to the boundaries of this singular story. In her succinct and appreciated foreword, Louisa Hall notes that the poems are about what it means to be “just another, statistical woman; one of the many women we become…”
I wait for night
to turn over within me.
Then another woman
walks out of the space
where I have been
—begins the book’s titular poem. The entire collection is marvelously duplicitous, its speakers all ‘other women’ yet fully defined individuals, such as in Bonner’s personas of typically smeared female characters famous for being both tied to and breaking free of men. In a collection constantly engaged with taking and giving power—volleying from “I won’t repair / your marriage I almost ruined” to “Not yet I told you to tell me when I was close / to breaking”—Bonner remains committed to turning the historically passive into the active. Lot’s Wife confesses “I ate salt, incessantly.” Delilah states plainly, “It was your hair I wanted.” If Bonner’s Dido were to begin a Google search with the letter W, the Internet would first suggest “woman,” then “warning,” each word a mutation of the other and the pair an infinitely reversible chemical reaction.
In a recent classroom discussion, a friend of mine asked a notable poet about recent surges in narratively infused poetry collections, those in which lyric poems string together like paper dolls that seem to know one another but probably couldn’t describe any member of their clique with complete paragraphs. Said poet gave a great note about not following trends, but the answer was more-or-less ‘marketability’ and not why such collections are marketable. As someone married to poetry but attempting affairs with other genres, I have always found that my spouse was best at describing the world around me: moment-to-moment clarity with little lateral threadwork. But a growing number of poets seem to write the inverse: moment-to-moment happenings undeniably linked through cause-and-effect or entropy’s unidirectional push. These collections show that, though our waking moments may teeter on the edge of certainty, something in the background pushes us on. We are driven by quiet combustion engines of which we are and are not aware. We can smell the fumes or hear the cylinders purr but cannot observe both at the same time.
Bonner’s Another Woman renders both the postmodern garnishes and anecdotal carbohydrates fueling each of us into an organic meal best enjoyed slowly but in one sitting. Consider the following two poems, which share neighboring pages:
In Spite Of
and when you told me you loved
your wife
it didn’t matter
and when you sent for me
in another state
it didn’t matter
and when you told me to leave
the next morning
it didn’t matter
and when you said you wouldn’t touch me
(and you touched me)
it didn’t matter
and when I wept, swore,
had other men (again, again)
it didn’t matter
and when I finally made haste
like a heroine
it didn’t matter
I did it all
(and then some)
to speak achingly
and to live.
Sun in January, Three Months Since You’ve Left
I can hear ice
all around me
breathing
“Sun in January, Three Months Since You’ve Left,” printed above in its entirety, is one of the collection’s shortest poems. Within the book itself, the lyrical and the narrative monopolize focus or offer it to one another, a tug-of-war keeping the reader’s hands firmly grasped on the rope until the collection’s end. Many of Bonner’s shorter pieces are remarkable for hybridizing the two modes, as in the following, which comes earlier in the collection:
And when he told her it was truly over this time
he looked at her like November light flung
long across a porch.
This back-and-forth has obviously been influenced by something that shouldn’t go unmentioned, which is the poet’s multidisciplinary artistic practice. Bonner, with an MFA in creative nonfiction and an MA in film studies (Another Woman is also the name of a parallel experimental short-film project), writes with a cinematic and critical pen that, through what only can be described as sleight-of-hand, produces seemingly unadulterated poetry on the page. It’s often the collection’s lyrical moments that build the most narrative value, each an example that disrupted and reshaped my understanding of space and story in a collection of contemporary poems. Bonner’s language consistently lilts through images before emerging into epiphanies: what was inky and blotted becomes clear in its final stanza, something crisp and defined emerging as if from a Rorschach test. Sometimes these changes even come full-circle, written on Möbius strips, like in “Night, Memory,” which begins with, “There is never just one deer” and ends with, “There is never just one / deer in the middle of the night.” Another Woman is a density in which the multiple becomes the singular and the singular multiplies. Bonner and her speakers exist in a world surplussed with sequels, a world not unlike that of contemporary cinema, in which everything drags on past its prime. In Hollywood, it’s A-listers and franchises that run ad infinitum; here, it’s a not-so-monogamous relationship, the omnipresence of does and bucks, the horizons of fields and meadows, the parallel rows of orchards.
In “Rupture,” Bonner writes “I am the blue torrent / arrowing through earth.” It reminds me of a saying my high school drama teacher had, one about arrows needing targets, that we wouldn’t achieve what we wanted to achieve if we didn’t know what we were aiming for. Desperate for regional one-act play victories, we never considered that even aimless arrows wield something not unlike narrative, however meaningless, between the bow from which they’re shot and the errant body they impact. The speakers in Hannah Bonner’s Another Woman are aimless in many ways—responding to and perpetrating small spasms, submitting to and resisting heat, all in a man’s land and in no man’s land—but Bonner isn’t asking you to score her shots through binoculars. Her arrow is here, its course as much of a story as any other, but freed from the constraints of accuracy. It is simply flying. Whistling, even.
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