In Jennifer Maier’s newest collection of poetry, The Occupant, she masters the art of animating inanimate objects—a conch shell, hairbrush, even a glass of wine—and establishes an immediate emotional connection that encourages a closer examination of the community that inhabits a home. Maier probes the unique personalities of household items as the emotional journey of the Occupant who resides alongside them unfolds.
The book’s poetic structure, with its mix of prose poems, free verse, and rhymed poetry, keeps the narrator’s and objects’ voices separate, allowing for individual character refinement. The Occupant, as the individual in the house, appears within the collection’s prose poems, setting it apart from the other objects. This person is without name, referred to in the third person as “she” and “woman.” The objects flourish in traditional poetic forms as inanimate items that take center stage with first-person narration, sharing life perspectives and lessons learned, a technique successful through direct communication with the Occupant, addressing her with “you.”
Maier allows scrutiny of each object to create distinctive personalities and attitudes. For example, in poem “Matchbook,” there exists the “content of the world: / hazard and illumination— / desire, consummation, ash” as the “twenty redheaded soldiers” use fire to ignite “the candle on your birthday cake” and expand figuratively as “one to burn your bridges.” The objects also objectify the Occupant, making their observations of her actions known. In “Spider,” as the eight-legged creature considers the lacewing approaching its web, it also comments on the human counterpart in the room:
Below, the woman
flits about the room, doing what she will.
Today she is knitting a scarf—.
Later, even the female narrator likens herself to a household object in a poem titled “The Occupant Assesses Her Current Condition, Consistent with Age and Use.” She now has a “hairline crack” that has been “badly chipped when a lover dropped her for someone else.” And yet, a satisfying realization arises: “She is still usable, able to hold nearly as much as before.”
Themes of beauty, light, darkness, and finality perch within the poems’ pages. Objects come alive as they reflect on their imprecise longevity. In the poem “Hairbrush,” the brush speaks in first person, dismissive of a pink stripe that decorates its handle as “inessential” and a “distraction” from the purity of the brush’s “Being.” As the poem progresses, the brush delves into the idea of beauty, lamenting its own limited utility, as it’s often relegated to a dark drawer. In a final note of soft anguish, the hairbrush acknowledges its existence is to “keep silent and move solely in one direction.” There is anger in “Cup and Saucer” as the dishes recall the quaint history of their use by women who appreciated their being “held poised and steady in a white-gloved / hand…” and who now mourn their “non-use” in the cupboard “shrouded in newsprint.” The short and blunt sentence, “That stopped with you,” cements the hurtful finality of their existence.
The prose poem format is successful in differentiating the Occupant from her surrounding objects due to the intimate internal dialogue, seen initially in the poems’ titles, then in their narration. The opening poem, “The Occupant Imagines the House as a Great Fish,” sets the scene, having lived for eight years “in its belly.” Descriptive prose authenticates the strong metaphor of a fish moving, floating, and watching: “How many mornings she has stood behind the large, glassy eyes that stare impassively down on the park.” The next poem in which the narrator surfaces, she is contemplating the ants that have taken over her bathroom in “The Occupant Considers Poisoning the Ants”: “For days she has watched them, one, a few, now a living pavement of black stones, crossing the white-tiled continent of the bathroom floor.” Everyday household concerns combine with a moral dilemma described in a detached, then tender tone: “In some countries, she knows, this passes for mercy.”
The frequency of reflections from the Occupant increases as her character grows through introspection and acceptance. For example, in “The Occupant Contemplates Selling the Family Heirloom,” the narrator uses lines from a classified advertisement selling a piece of antique furniture to peel back layers of emotional vulnerability. With powerful language, “whether the bad would go with it, written in the grain, as trauma on the rings of a tree” or in the fear of “the carved claw feet that couldn’t scratch or run away,” the hidden dynamic of a person’s story is captured in raw language. Later, in “The Occupant Is Visited by the Dead Poet,” the narrator converses with a dead poet to examine the hold words have. The use of repetition—when the dead poet asks over and over, “What else?”—addresses the need to explore the meaning of words, one’s feelings, and the emotional response. Acceptance begins to surface in “After a Period of Sadness the Occupant Wakes from a Happy Dream” before self-approval and understanding culminates in the book’s final prose poem, “The Occupant Revisits the Rooms of Her Life and Arrives at a Late Understanding.”
The book’s setting in various rooms of a house affords an opportunity to span time and space, traveling to the past and contemplating the future. Early on, the narrator desires to speak to the house’s former occupants: “She’d like to ask them a few things. Why did you wallpaper the ceiling?” and yet she is unable to understand their response, noting “she is not yet proficient in the dialects of silence.” In “Light Bulb,” the question of future and past seeks its relevance for this object:
who, or whatever succeeds
you may pause to reflect
that once, you were not
your own light. Then,
who among your vanished
race would return,
traverse the long, unlit
hall to hold one again
in his animal hand,
recalling how you placed
them: low at the side
of the bed
In all, Maier’s poetry is a delightful treasure chest of words and imagery. In “Mirror,” “two strangers on a bridge” meet in the bathroom mirror. Teeth as “small, vacant chairs” and the tongue as “soft rug” resonates in “Toothbrush.” In “Whisk,” rhyme is used to describe itself as “a small steel cage / without a heart” and “the mad hand that moves me / lives single and apart—.” The poem, “Kitchen Knife,” delivers clever lines “—what good’s an onion / whole, except to throw?” and catchy alliteration “—parsing your days like / parsley…” within creative formatting that shapes the poem into a knife blade. Even the book’s cover art of a young woman inside a rustic kitchen, fingertips resting on an egg as her eyes connect with the onlooker, exudes an air of appropriate tenderness, a statement on moments in time, space, and the objects residing within. Using imaginative prose and sparkling originality, The Occupant delivers a creative living landscape through dutiful observation and sentimental reflection of the ordinary.
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