Natalie Eilbert, Overland

My review of Natalie Eilbert's Overland (Copper Canyon, 2023) [see my review of her prior book here] is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

Natalie Eilbert, Indictus

I tell a friend I want to delete this whole book so that no one will see it

and he says I should hold onto that feeling (“To Read Pomes Is to Follow Another Line to the Afterlife. / To Write Them Is to Wed Life with Afterlife.”)

Brooklyn poet and editor Natalie Eilbert’s latest poetry collection is Indictus (Las Cruces, NM: Noemi Press, 2018), winner of the 2016 Noemi Poetry Contest, and a follow-up to her Swan Feast (Bloof Books 2015) [see my review of such here]. In a book constructed via poetry, fiction and non-fiction, Eilbert writes on the brutality and messiness of trauma, the body and consent. On the back cover, Indictus is described by Morgan Parker (among others) in glowing terms, including that “One could say this is a book of poetry by a woman who has endured unspeakable trauma and lived to bear its witness. One could also say, this book is an incredible document of survival.” “Indictus,” of course, is Latin, the masculine of the feminine “indicta” and neutral “indictum,” meaning, variantly, “declared, proclaimed, published, announced, having been declared” and/or “appointed, fixed, named, having been appointed.”

Nothing happened. The alcohol shone

over the night. I cried once. A woman approached me

and said as much. A seam ripped.

many seams ripped. A hole leaked

from my hole, spilling decadent oils.

My mind is quick to spoil. I am like the rock thrown

in my uncle’s grave. I land without ceremony or miracle

with the other dirts. My diets. My flesh thins

around perception’s hegemonic mutations.

I bury data inside me, birth information.

A rock beneath my feet glows new rhetoric—

I am golem I am clay I am

the breath of my own shitty god.

To believe what was done to me is curable,

assumes a shape. This assumes

what was done to me is truly done. (“Man Hole”)

In an interview conducted by Megan Giddings and posted at SmokeLong Quarterly in 2016, Eilbert speaks to some of her approach to, and advice on, among other things, writing:

For women, it isn’t enough to have an idea about our objective space, because our objective space has always been one imposed on our bodies. We watch brown bodies shot dead and raped in the streets and some artists have the gall to say this is poetry of witness, but it is yet one more way to remove the person from the idea, to say that their pain is a concept from which to move an artistic and/or rhetorical direction. My advice is to reconsider what balance means because, likely, that balance needs to be toppled. You might need to slip on the spill to know the bucket’s been kicked on its side. And when that happens, split lipped and swearing, can you really take your pain of emotional experience to a greater vision. But then you must trouble that vision. You need to let yourself be messy and then neat and then you need to piss on those satin sheets.

Constructed as groupings/suites of individual poems as well as longer sequences, Indictus exists as a book-length long poem on the violence done to women and women’s bodies, exploring the pieces as they are collected and reassembled, and how they got there in the first place. The poems in Indictus are intimate, raw and emotionally bare, and allow nothing and no-one off the hook, naming names and demanding acknowledgment, penance and, occasionally, retribution. Eilbert writes with a barely-contained rage, one carefully and craftfully harnessed and directed before released at full force. If you think these are poems of unravelling, you are reading it wrong.

Indictus

I read yesterday that crimes are committed at a higher frequency during hotter temperature spikes. What was the language of my first crime? First, it was the house where I was born. I never dreamed. I never remember dreaming. This is not where it begins. Whenever I said I was up to nothing, my mother knew the opposite was true. She didn’t know what the opposite might mean. I smeared four sticks of butter all over my bedroom wall in secret and she knocked on my door. What are you doing / Nothing. For years I found yellow knobs on my wall and then the house was gone by way of fire. We watched the inferno from the neighbor’s driveway. This was years after that same neighbor removed my language—or it was only a year? Who is counting all the little footsteps toward error? When I sweat I am a half-species begging my body to stay alive, just a little bit longer.

Natalie Eilbert, Swan Feast

CONVERSATION WITH THE STONE WIFE

Nothing interests me anymore. A garden is too enthusiastic

to be alive for its own sake. The highway, now that is something.

I want to be paved into colorless stone. Because you don’t

believe me anymore and you’ve lodged with too many sisters,

am I correct in saying the engines of trucks sound arcane,

that you love the unbelievable smoke of winners? Define desire:

when have I ever made isolation difficult, it is my primary vocative

as when cars pedal their blood-speed down the interstate.

They bend as you, swerve around struck geese as you word

your desires. Define for me a body. I guess as its opposite: crows lift

heavily from powerlines at the scattergun of a flabby man,

everywhere the smell of ersatz semen from dogwoods. Bereft.

These hours spin, are the aspirin dust of every horse gallop.

I’ve ceased my worries of being fathomed. I am stone. Sex.

No need for coddling, no need for linear paths of diction.

In the parade, I am a distant cousin’s milktooth rattling

a mason jar. Someday the man with his gun will lift his legs

into a fabulous pair of corduroys. That sound will be a caw,

not the soundtrack of desiccated desert bones. But the highway:

crowded buses move the forsythia with definitive violence

in a way I know means I will never know touch. How cruel

to be so heavenly a body without body, the charge and wail

of skin and the city and distance. Last winter the life of a batter

could poison the oceans forever—how could I tire of this?

Since then the Arctic seas have warmed. Disasters loom

with smug portending. I want to be opened, for someone’s gaze

on my fissures. To be smelled for the ice age inside me.

I’ve been curious about poet and editor Natalie Eilbert’s first full-length poetry collection, the expansive Swan Feast (Atlanta GA: Coconut Books, 2015), a book, as Julie Carr writes on the back cover, composed as “a twenty-first century hymn to the Venus of Wilendorf, a 30,000-year-old figuring whose ample body is a protest against all that seeks to diminish us.” Swan Feast is set as a conversation with, and attempting to voice, the Venus of Willendorf, “one of the earliest images of the body made by humankind.” According to Wikipedia (another source of information sits here): “The Venus of Willendorf, now known in academia as the Woman of Willendorf, is a 11.1-centimetre (4.4 in) high statuette of a female figure estimated to have been made between about 28,000 and 25,000 BCE.” Through the collection, Eilbert explores and works to articulate a connection between herself and this lost, ancient goddess through conversations on privilege, empire, and gender and cultural violence, occasionally wrapped up in information that may or may not be biographical. This book is, as Carr writes, written as protest, and pushing to be heard, yet the poems in this collection are incredibly intimate, self-questioning and self-aware, focusing her gaze as much on the self as on anything else, as she writes in “WE WATCH AS IF WAITING FOR THE ARTIFACT TO OPEN HER EYES.”: “I am pregnant / with another myth’s god, you know.” Hers are poems that channels rage, frustration and an autobiography of a “fallen goddess,” attempting to speak to and through the image of the ancient stone woman. In the first of her two poems titled “THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE VENUS CITY,” Eilbert shows how she allows herself such permission to speak for and through the goddess/statue:

What will amount to our kingdoms, our Willendorf in the sand.

Can I speak for the Venus, alien object, the way one walks

over seeds buried loose in the snow, can I speak for her

the way a grave-good decorates a ritual, the way styrofoam brims

laughably in the municipal trash. I will speak for her as I spoke

for myself as a girl behind her bedroom door. When I found her

she was marked in Grandpa Leo’s anthology an ugly thing to watch:

in her image the hands still combed her form, a log against nothing.

Swan Feast is structured in eight sections-as-mirror-image, from the central point of the third section, “CONVERSATION WITH THE STONE WIFE,” rippling out to untitled second and fourth sections of shorter lyrics, to first and fifth longer, more expansive sections titled “THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE VENUS CITY,” to a final section constructed as a single poem, bookending alongside the opening poem, “With Queen of Willendorf” (why the final poem is considered a section, while the opening poem is not seems a minor question of structure). The shorter poems, which themselves are long-lined and stretch down the length and breadth of the page, are powerful, but pale in comparison to the rush of sentences that make up the first of her two “THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE VENUS CITY” poems. The piece is vibrant, and occasionally overwhelms, containing some fantastic lines, enough to stop any reader dead in their tracks, from “The city sun sets every day now like Muybridge’s horse, suffering time.” to “Discovery renders / archaeologists sole creators of their artifacts, just as man is sole creator / of man.” Through Natalie Eilbert, this is very much a feast, enough that it often requires portioning, and yet, the effect of the rush appears deliberate: she wants you to be overwhelmed. Through conversation, Eilbert’s collection exists as a study on a variety of violences against women, and a call for action against such violence. This is a powerful book, and one that requires a great deal of attention. Later in the collection, one of the most striking poems has to be “SUPPLICATION WITH THE VENUS FIGURINE,” that includes: “It’s true I’ve stared at my breasts long enough // in the bathtub until their fatty geographies // become something other than what they are.” The poem opens:

The rupture of our little red lives, V.

Should I name blames when I say the sun

when it hits the floorboards right here

pushes a lonesome into the tip of my finger,

pushes my mother off a ledge so she is the city

I worship with $4 coffees. I’m late again

and will cancel the therapy I need to not starve

and feel good about starving because lately

your gut is a ballast. My navel smiles deeply

in the folds as I round my back for rabbit’s pose.