Skinny by Carolyn Hembree
Skinny
by Carolyn Hembree
Kore Press, 2012
ISBN: 978-1888553505
69 p.p.
Reading Carolyn Hembree’s Skinny, I was immediately attracted to the magical realism within it. Skinny draws on mythology, folklore and storytelling, surreal elements, and domestic imagery—all against a natural backdrop with lots of birds, trees, and water. As Amber Sparks explains in her essay “NEW GENRES: Domestic Fabulism or Kansas with a Difference,” magical realism involves “fantastical elements [that] are often cribbed from myth, fairy tale or folk tale. Strange things happen and characters react by shrugging: animals talk, people fly, the dead get up and walk around.”
Strange things happen in Skinny. The reader is tossed right into this fantastical, sensory world—one that makes its own rules, logically and syntactically—immediately and with immediacy. The first poem of Skinny, “A Real Movie Star” has both a forest and a talking bird. Difficult to unlock and driven by sound, this poem prepares the reader for what’s to come, for the odd way our speaker will communicate with us:
Crowd keeps while breakneck we
onto a designer street, a day wind northerly against us, running as if
the world ought a forest be—tall and winsome and all the good
air and time and talk you could take you’d be brought.
Though at first the language feels jarring, the reader quickly adjusts and begins to understand the narrative on a different level. I’m not all that familiar with language poetry, and I’m not sure this is it. According to “A Brief Guide to Language Poetry” on poets.org, one of the key aspects of language poetry is the idea that language itself commands meaning. The article states, “Language poetry also seeks to involve the reader in the text, placing importance on reader participation in the construction of meaning. By breaking up poetic language, the poet is requiring the reader to find a new way to approach the text.” Though the book contains more narrative than I think is evoked by a truly language-driven poem, Skinny forces the reader to leave the familiar rules at the door and find a new approach.
This is not to say there isn’t form, but rather that Skinny finds its own forms in poems like “Ode on Another Ingénue’s Ophelia for Two Voices” and “The Venus de Milo Tree.” “Ode” takes the form of a conversation between Skinny and Bird. Though the language propels the poem forward and the narrative is enigmatic, we are grounded as observers watching this conversation take place. The form allows us a way into the poem. Similarly, “The Venus de Milo Tree” begins with a cast of characters and a list of settings (“A pastoral homestead/ A foreign shore”) that helps us understand where we are and—literally—who’s on stage. A section titled “Intermission” furthers the conceit of the play:
Hands too for handing down handmade heirlooms and for keeping faces soft and new (buttercream is best).
Don’t try and put a head on nature.
A briolette, a mind on the wing—
Lost you lost in this lost that you see that you got that you and that you in that
These closing lines of “Intermission” give a sense of Skinny’s voice. It’s both playful and dark, child-like and heartbroken. The repetition of words and sounds of words uses the English language in a fresh way that opens each poem up to new meaning. The speaker seems always to be searching and brings us as readers into this hunt. Skinny ends on such a note, speaking (to the reader? Mamie? The soldier?) in second person: “You mistook this grove—/ far for home.” A simple switch of preposition takes our assumption and bends it, however slightly, away from expectation.
At first, Skinny may seem reluctant to let us in, but Hembree teaches us to read: the convoluted syntax seems to grow as we become comfortable in this world. The poems are ripe with images that tempt us back in each time. Skinny keeps up with our learning curve. In the end, the journey is worth it. As a bonus, check out Carolyn Hembree’s website for a video of the author reading “Still of Mamie and Bird” with visual accompaniments here and here.
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Carolyn Hembree was born in the twin city of Bristol, Tennessee. Following her graduation from Birmingham-Southern College, Carolyn moved to New York by way of Greenville, South Carolina. During these lean years, she found employment as a cashier, house cleaner, cosmetics consultant, telecommunicator, actor, receptionist, paralegal, and freelance writer. She least enjoyed her brief post in a hotel basement where she alphabetized business cards next to a ten-pound bag of defrosting chicken parts. Like so many stars, Carolyn burned too brightly: her film debut was, alas, her swan song. For the NYU student flick Altered States, the aspiring actor, an albino boa constrictor draping her shoulders, spun in the February rain atop a roof in Alphabet City. On a train ride from Emily Dickinson’s Amherst, she decided to pursue the less perilous vocation of poetry writing. Carolyn received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona.
Photo credit:
Poet photo courtesy of usf.edu
