Holding Contradictions: Sarah B. Boyle’s What’s pink & shiny / what’s dark and hard
By Meryl DePasquale, December 7, 2015
Sarah B. Boyle, What’s pink & shiny / what’s dark and hard, Porkbelly Press 2015
Last summer, a group of anti-abortion activists released several undercover videos that showed Planned Parenthood officials discussing the use of tissue from aborted fetuses in medical research, during conversations with actors the activist group enlisted to pose as biotechnology workers. The pretend controversy was whether the organization was doing something illegal—selling fetal tissue for profit—as the activist group claimed. Planned Parenthood asserted that its actions were completely legal; the fetal tissue was donated, with consent from patients, and neither the organization nor the patients benefitted financially. Planned Parenthood also said that the videos were heavily edited, with conversations taken out of context, but the organization’s president apologized for the “tone” a top official had used.
So far, there is no evidence of wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood, even after several investigations. But legality was always the pretend controversy. The real controversy was not about fetal tissue, but about a woman’s right to choose in the first place. The heightened emotional language used by conservative lawmakers in their push to defund the country’s largest provider of abortions concerned ethics and values. Like many women, I watched with dismay as our bodies again became a site for political theater. But as a poet, I recognized that this deep ideological rift is a wound in the American psyche that isn’t healing. Reactions to the videos on both sides of the debate were vocalizations of the hurts we feel, living in a culture that oversimplifies the complexities of human sexuality and human emotion.
Then on the day after Thanksgiving, there was a shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, the state where I live. Two civilians and a law enforcement officer died; nine more people were wounded. After his arrest, the gunman Robert L. Dear, Jr. told investigators, “No more baby parts.” Now there is speculation about how much the GOP’s hostile rhetoric about Planned Parenthood may have influenced Dear’s actions, and Americans were left wondering if our words can still matter. Then this past Thursday, the Senate voted to defund Planned Parenthood, despite the investigations, a promise of the president’s veto, and the shooting in Colorado Springs. The vote is being called a symbolic gesture. To me, the vote symbolizes an extreme failure of empathy and an endless cycle of hurting.
Poetry is the place I go to explore the power, and the failings, of words. In Sarah B. Boyle’s poems, I find words that resist the tendency to oversimplify the complexities of human sexuality and human emotion. Boyle’s poetry chapbook, What’s pink & shiny / what’s dark and hard (Porkbelly Press, 2015), provides a brutal honesty about abortion that our culture has been yearning for, and actually dying for the lack of. Here is empathy with teeth; the kind that will reopen the wound, lick it clean, and give you another chance to heal yourself better.
These poems ask provocative and heartbreaking questions, like How can we write about abortion without erasers? and What is the male lover’s role during the procedure and its aftermath? I read the book at a frantic pace: it wouldn’t allow me to look away. Boyle’s work is consciously and unapologetically feminist, and also, as bell hooks would say, for everybody. Her poems are intimate, and charged with larger political ramifications; tender, and unflinching about body fluids and viscera. Her images startle: “Planned / Parenthood fed me a pill / like a quarter / and a gumball bled / from between my legs.” Boyle moves skillfully from the mechanical realm to the natural world. Here’s “Chapter 4: One Wednesday” in its entirety:
I’ve told you this story in tongue and tooth.
And still you do not know.
This time with fingers.
I stood at the butcher block separating eggs.
Cracked one and strained the white through my fingers.
Two yolks lay in the cup of my palm.
I cast them into the empty bowl and cracked another.
The white tore itself from two yolks
twined in doubled ropes of chalaza.
Later, at the clinic, I swallowed the pill.
At home I pushed four chalky tabs against my cervix.
I called for you from the bedroom.
Know it was hours of tissue that bled
from the bloom of my cervix.
Know you should have been in the room.
Know the egg’s viscous white and wavering yolks.
Know it was not just those two eggs I rent,
but three.
The poems refer to high and low art, both the beautiful and the grotesque, bedbugs and forsythia. From Boyle’s viewpoint, the ability to hold contradictions is not only aesthetics, but a feminist practice, essential to true understanding. She holds tightly, and her insights are strong on account. Part of this practice means living with unsettling juxtapositions, like “forceps are slender / and curve like the swan’s neck when he stretches.” Another part is moving between different perspectives and landscapes: female prisoners on D-Block, the home garden, the art gallery, the waiting room for a legal abortion, a manual posted to a blog describing how unlicensed practitioners can perform abortion for women without legal options.
Boyle’s ability to hold contradictions lays the groundwork for making sense of the current political situation. Americans were shown that we live in a world where fetal tissue (or “baby parts”) is used to find cures for diseases, where the end of an unwanted pregnancy can become the salvation of many, where death can preserve life. In theory, we already knew these things, but in the videos, imagery was evoked that was hard to face. Some of us balked. Some of us coped by oversimplifying the situation, vilifying providers and/or patients, turning off our empathy in select areas. Boyle models ways to face images that are “dark & hard,” to interrupt that cycle of hurting, to deal with our wounds thoroughly by taking every connection into account.
Boyle’s poems are finely crafted and attuned to the literary milieu that surrounds them. One uses the traditional form of the ghazal; another employs erasure. Boyle examines how the male writer’s gaze lands on a female reader. The poems weave in foremothers, like Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton, who have written about abortion. Boyle’s voice is original and unique; the poems carry these allusions deftly. Her work considers the difficulty of utterance: “We don’t recant Can’t” and the problematic ways that language is used against us. However, Boyle’s speaker is not only acted upon. She has resolve and the agency to “retch the letter / loose.”
This chapbook is extraordinary and devastating. As a debut, it brims with promise. I’m looking forward to a more expansive offering from this compelling writer.
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Meryl DePasquale is the author of the chapbook Dream of a Perfect Interface (Dancing Girl Press, 2013). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous places, including DIAGRAM, Taurpaulin Sky Literary Journal and The Offending Adam. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities.
(Ominous) top image via the American Life League flickr photostream, September 2015. “Pro-life activists attend the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on Planned Parenthood's taxpayer funding.“
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Fabulous Beast: The Sow, Hyacinth Girl Press, May 2013
Editors’ Note: Though we’ve posted the occasional small press review in the past, The Hairsplitter has decided to take a more active hand in publishing small press reviews, especially books published by very small presses. This review, by new contributor Sarah B. Boyle, marks the first in our more formal series of small press reviews.
That Hyacinth Girl Press is, per its website, “a micro-press that publishes up to 6 poetry chapbooks each year,” seems appropriate for a fresh start. If you’re interested in contributing, please see our About Us page. We hope you enjoy Sarah’s piece, and remember to support all presses, great and small!
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Shortly after Galway Kinnell passed away, my husband and I left our children with my parents for the evening and went to a reading in his honor. As with all poetry readings, some poems grabbed me and some let me wander happily away. Near the end of the reading, Terrance Hayes read “Saint Francis and the Sow.” The whole room fell into the poem, breathing its language into deep hidden places that were suffocating for lack of what the poem offered up. Everyone needed to know that they would “flower again from within, of self-blessing.” The desire to flower from within is universal. We all are born, we all bless ourselves and flower into new beings, many times over before we die. Even when it feels like the blessings are worthless and newness impossible, we flower.
Fabulous Beast: The Sow, by Sarah Kain Gutowski, takes “Saint Francis and the Sow” as its epigraph—the chapbook begins with transformation through self-blessing. Gutowski then tells the story of a mother who is a sow who mothers her piglets by instinct and without conscious understanding of her actions. The poems are both fabulous in the transformations the mother experiences and beastly in the sheer animalness of the mother herself.
Some books come to you in language and intellect. Others touch you in the recesses of your brain where preverbal memories mingle with primal instincts. Fabulous Beast: The Sow found me at a time when I was still more animal than woman. After my son was born, I understood that I was animal and he was animal and our life together was terrifyingly animal—in the pull of my body to his, in the instinct that brought his balled fists to his bawling mouth, in the howling pain that came from his refusing my breast over and over. The mother of Fabulous Beast, the mother who is a sow, spoke directly into my animal brain and body. And so my understanding of this book bypassed words. I was the sow. I am still the sow, on days when my body sends another egg out in hopes of more and more and more babies, on days when my breasts ache with phantom milk, on days when my children’s faces are unbearable in their roundness.
Much like the litter of piglets “that slides from her now: water drops/sliding from a rain-soaked leaf,” Fabulous Beast is a tiny perfect being that entered this world wholly formed and already perfectly itself. Of course, just like those piglets, the book didn’t arrive ex nihilo—but the labor of its making is equally as obscure as the transformation of sperm and egg into a human with ten fingers and toes and an inborn capacity for speech. Fabulous Beast is a collection of poems about what it is to be suddenly and surprisingly animal. Both the mother at its center and the book itself know exactly what they are but resist logical categorizing and analysis.
And the mother at the center of Fabulous Beast is a sow who is caged by her own massive sow body. In “The Mother Moves In The Dark,” the collection’s first poem, the mother is “being used” by her children. They used her as an incubator and now they use her as food, suckling on her “long line of teat”. There is a fundamental disconnect between the mother’s body and her mind. Her body sustains her young, with or without her conscious consent:
She has so little control over the great body
she wakes inside, with a groan, each morning.
Such a burden: to be locked in flesh.
Her breast hangs down in one long line of teat,
a nipple for each hungry mouth.
The body of the mother is the sow but the mother is a prisoner of the sow. For any who have lived through nine months of pregnancy, labor, and the suckling of a newborn—a newborn pressing its tiny body against your own unrecognizable shape—this feeling of being “locked in flesh” is viscerally familiar.
For what else is motherhood but a series of inescapable transformations? The changes wrought by pregnancy are out of a science fiction story: the human woman becomes a female animal carrying an alien life in her center. And so throughout Fabulous Beast, the mother transforms. For example, in “The Mother Shifts Her Shape”: “She can change at will,/and sometimes against her will” into “a monkey/baring its hot gums and yellow teeth.” The changes are mysterious and inescapable. “For how long will she be/locked in a strange new skin, married to an alien name?” The answer to the question lies locked in the web of chemicals that steers us through our lives. And the love—the instinct to protect—we have for our children changes our bodies and rewires our brains. The answer to the question is incomprehensible, for the mother will be “locked in a strange new skin” forever.
Later, in “Some Things The Mother Cannot Change,” the mother shapeshifts to become the farmer’s dead wife. In the universe of the book, the mother is now both sow and woman. “When she feels lonely and she envies the swan/her constant mate,” the mother “laces his calloused fingers with her own.” The poem has us question whether the mother’s transformation into (back into?) a woman was a choice driven by loneliness or whether the mother was transformed against her will by her an animal longing for companionship, by the farmer who “breathes into her.” Gutowski gives us no answer to the question, because—again—the mother both willingly and unwillingly desires sexual contact, even after procreation. The woman makes choices and the sow is compelled by nature. They are both true.
The mothers of Fabulous Beast, the central mother of the book and her mother and the “mothers” who appear as a collective presence, appear throughout the book veiled in fog and mist. Their secrets stay shrouded from view and are accessible only by the preverbal and the instinctual. In “Our Mothers Are Children, Too” the mother-as-sow misses “the one who birthed her—a figure made from fog/rising off the yellowed grass on a hot August morning.” And in the final poem, “How Our Mothers Recognize Their Limits,” the mother-as-farmer’s-dead-wife tends to the sleeping baby human inside the farmhouse:
She raises the boy and drapes him over this other female’s shoulder,
in a way she could never lift her own young with the sow’s awkward body.
He breathes clouds into the air beside her head, and that vapor mixes
with her own exhalations. Together they sway, boy and his ghost mother,
winter whistling through the eaves above his bed.
Here, in the language of the final poem, even as the mother assumes human shape and cares for a human child, a son, she remains in “this other female’s” body. The mother is not a woman who was briefly transformed into a sow. The mother is the sow who occasionally becomes human. How long will she be locked in a strange new skin? Forever, Gutowski suggests. Mothering is forever, and the mists that shroud it are inescapable.
Just as Galway Kinnell tells us just when we need to hear it most that “everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing,” so Fabulous Beast: The Sow speaks to the part of me thirsty for self-blessing that will let the mysterious mother animal inside me flower. But even as Gutowski reveals truths about what it is to be the mother, those truths remain obscured by the mist and mystery of the mother and how her son’s “vapor mixes/with her own exhalations.” After Fabulous Beast, however, I know don’t need to understand the animal to access the self-blessing and flower from within—because I am reminded that self-blessing is intrinsic. And so it bypasses logic and language to let the woman flower into animal and be lovely in the transformation.
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Author’s Disclosure: I just signed on as the reviews editor for Hyacinth Girl Press, and I know the editor in chief Margaret Bashaar. But I bought and read Fabulous Beast: The Sow well before we ever met in person and have turned to it over and over since that time.
Sarah B. Boyle is a poet, mother, activist, and high school teacher. She is the author of the chapbook What's pink & shiny/what's dark & hard (forthcoming from Porkbelly Press), and her poems and essays have appeared in Cheat River Review, Menacing Hedge, Entropy, and elsewhere. Following the rapes and assaults that ripped through multiple literary communities this past year, she edited a series of essays for Delirious Hem on rape culture and the poetics of alt lit. Find her online at impolitelines.com.
Header image, “Dan Brown and His Pigs in Dublin, New Hampshire,” ca. 1900, published by the Keene Public Library and the Historical Society of Cheshire County, via Flickr
