Adrienne Gruber, Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes: Essays on Motherhood

 

After I became a mom, stuff began to fall on me.
            It took a few years for me to notice, a few more years before it became a regular occurrence, and even more time before it felt like a hazard. Eventually, I thought that perhaps I should be wearing a helmet or a hard hat around my apartment, or that I should outfit myself with a chest and backplate to allow for optimal protection.
            I compiled a list of things that fell on me.
            Tools. A measuring tape. A giant brick of Parmesan cheese that Dennis bought from Costco. A bottle of Shout. A jug of laundry detergent. Packages of instant noodles. The handle of the vacuum. My kids’ puffy jackets, and other clothes shoved in the bedroom closet. Shoes. The circular blades of the food processor. Paper towel rolls. Bottles of bubbly water. Individual containers of applesauce. Picture frames. That tiny fucking Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom castle. Cans of tuna.
            Puttering around my apartment became a contact sport. I needed to anticipate falling objects, slow down time in order to have the chance to react, to pull my body out of the way. I had to be on high alert at all times.
            It was also my job to heal quickly and efficiently and quietly if I happened to get struck by something. To not make my daughters wait a single second longer for their Goldfish crackers, their cut-up apples, or their TV.

I’m amazed by the writing and shape of Vancouver writer Adrienne Gruber’s hybrid essay collection, Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes: Essays on Motherhood (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2024), produced as “Essais No. 16.” If you aren’t aware of their “essais” series, titles produced over the past decade or so include Erin Wunker’s Feminist Killjoy: Essays on everyday life (2016) [see my review of such here], Chelene Knight’s Dear Current Occupant: A Memoir (2018) [see my review of such here], Margaret Christakos’ Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2016) [see my review of such here] and River Halen’s Dream Rooms (2022) [see my review of such here]. Moving through the titles-to-date, the series, edited by Toronto poet Julie Joosten, appears to focus on prose works (a handful of which attend threads on mothers and motherhood) that aren’t straightforward to categorize, offering stunning and in-depth, deeply personal works of lyric/hybrid prose by numerous Canadian writers at the top of their game. If you seek personal essays composed by writers unafraid of blending genre, poetic language and twisting expectation, these titles easily include some of the most powerful writing I’ve read in years.

Following Gruber’s three full-length poetry collections—This is the Nightmare (Saskatoon SK: Thistledown Books, 2008), Buoyancy Control (Book*hug, 2016) and Q & A (Book*hug, 2019) [see my review of such here]— Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes feels a direct extension of some of the concerns of that third poetry title, itself described as “a poetic memoir detailing a first pregnancy, birth and early postpartum period.” Gruber explores and articulates the dark elements of pregnancy and mothering, from depression and exhaustion to whole swaths of anxiety across wonderfully astute, unflinching and absolutely devastating lyric and hybrid prose. She attends the beautiful moments, certainly, but digs deep into the physical, spiritual and psychological difficulties she endured surrounding motherhood, from the tantrums of her firstborn, ongoing mental health challenges and watching her mother’s cognitive decline. Gruber writers of and through numerous elements so often dismissed as the messy business of motherhood, acknowledging the blood that accompanies this kind of beauty. “An ache radiates from my tailbone and becomes like white noise,” she writes, to open the essay “How She Runs,” “humming and flickering in the background. When I change positions, bend over, or go from standing to sitting, my lower back twinges. Sometimes the pain is simply a feeling of tenderness, as though I’d just finished an intense workout. Sometimes it's deeper, sharper. Occasionally it disappears momentarily, usually when I shift position, and for minutes, and sometimes hours, after I go for a walk.” Gruber’s essays push deep against the straightforward narratives of the beautiful and effortless ease of motherhood, digging into the realities of just what kind of journey she’s been on, from the moments and myriad clusters of chaos, serious depression, physical changes, and the unexpected and expected delights through the absolute and spectacular.

Ancient navigators thought the sea was filled with a number of dangerous sea monsters, but the Kraken, a legendary cephalopod-like beast in Nordic folklore was, by far, the most terrifying. So large as to sometimes be mistaken for an island, the danger was not simply the creature itself but the whirlpool left in its wake.
            When I gave birth to my daughter, I became the Kraken. Forty hours of unmedicated labour followed by five hours of pushing will do that to a person. I grew extra limbs that flailed and thrashed. With each contraction, I rose from the birth pool like a colossal mollusk, ready to crush and consume.

Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes exists as a curious montage of literary panache, from more traditionally-straightforward essays to a pregnancy journal to sections that lean more into the lyric, such as an accumulated essay on smell (pregnancy heightening certain of the senses, after all, including the sense of smell). Gruber writes openly and honestly about a wide range of fears, anxieties and experiences on pregnancy and motherhood across and around her eventual three daughters. She writes of her grandmother, and the challenges of her mother’s increasing requirement for care, allowing the book to attend to generations, from her grandmother to her mother, down to her daughters. Gruber writes of the presumption, both culturally and her own, of maternal invincibility: something she long saw in her own mother, until that, too, began to deteriorate. “After the breakdown,” she writes of her mother, “and a combined diagnosis of catatonia and psychosis, my mother’s health begins to decline. It’s slow at first, the erosion, then a landslide rushing over exposed soil, dragging bits of it away. The meds dull her personality, make her tired. As a new mom, I’m tired too, with little energy to help build back up what had already been washed away.” There are passages that feel entirely composed as a ball of anxiety, but the writing is clear, even propulsive, and provides such clarity, and, above all, such a deep and abiding love.

Toward the end of Quintana’s birth, every second contraction was less intense. It was during those less excruciating spasms that I moaned the loudest, that I felt the most sorry for myself.
            There is a difference between pain and suffering.
            I tell people I used a birthing tub, that I birthed my first baby at home in my own apartment, that Dennis put a note on our door apologizing to our neighbours for the noise. I say I ate Popsicles and took hot showers, that I squatted on all fours like an animal and screamed in the privacy of my walk-in closet.
            All of this is true. None of this is true. (“Catalogue”)

Alison Prine, Loss and Its Antonym

 

SONG OF A SMALL CITY

a small city is not an apple

it is not a cathedral or a gown

a small city produces a confetti rain of tree blossoms

in the breath of a small city there are translations and the clinking of coins

here light falls across our faces

here one hour is transplanted into the next

a small city does not recognize its own hands

a small city holds up less sky and is therefore less grand and less weary

a small city does not muscle toward the sea

the distance from the top to the bottom of a small city is one lost shoe

I’ve been appreciating Burlington, Vermont poet Alison Prine’s second full-length collection, Loss and Its Antonym (Sequim WA: Headmistress Press, 2024), produced as winner of the 2023 Sappho’s Prize in Poetry. Following the publication of her debut collection, Steel (Cider Press Review, 2016), the poems in Prine’s Loss and Its Antonym are composed around silence, as a kind of hush; articulating so much of what is spoken and unspoken, set down in fierce and delicate first-person lyrics. “it is hard to distinguish each element / locust blossoms falling from high branches,” she writes, as part of the poem “STRAYED,” “a full ashtray on the kitchen table / the smell of hard rain // posture of a woman ready to step / from one life to another [.]” There is such an ease to these lines across some difficult terrain, of losses that sequence and compound, including the early loss of her mother, and subsequent stepmother, as she writes in the poem “WISH BONE”: “My sister worried at our father’s wedding— / that because she was seven when our mother died // we would lose our stepmother / when she turned fourteen. She believed // loss was divisible by sevens.” There is something astounding about how she balances such weight, from lines that seem, at times, almost weightless to the depths of such losses, and how those losses continue to reveal themselves, even after a distance of years; something astounding, as well, in how Prine balances between those weights, while still composing a collection of poems about emerging out the other side from those losses, from that same grief. “Look for the small purple fleck in the center,” she writes, as part of the poem “CLOSE,” “it isn’t always there, but when it is // it focuses the grace. So much of what we lost / was held in the same hands.” In the end, this might be a collection around grief and loss, but one that emerges just as much into Prine acknowledging the bonds of family, and of sisters; a bond that allowed for the possibility of moving through and potentially beyond such devastating losses. As the same poem closes: “I don’t know what happened // in your family, but in my family it felt / like the world was split, over and over // and all that was left / were sisters.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sarah Jane Sloat

Sarah J. Sloat is a visual poet who splits her time between Frankfurt and Barcelona, where she works in news. Her collage, poetry and prose have appeared in Diagram, Shenandoah and Sixth Finch, among other publications. Sarah’s book of visual poetry, Classic Crimes, is due in 2025 from Sarabande Books, which also published her previous book, Hotel Almighty.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Writing poetry changed my life, but I’m not sure publishing poetry has. My first chapbook came out about 15 years ago and I’ve since published four more. Soon after the last chapbook I got into visual poetry. It was a complete refresh for me, and at first seemed a diversion. But I got attached to bringing a visual element to my work, it adds layers, associations and new possibilities. After I published a number of poems using the novel Misery, Sarabande approached me with the idea of a collection, which became Hotel Almighty. I’m grateful and still astounded. I’ll publish a second book with Sarabande next year, sourced from William Roughead’s Classic Crimes, one of the first books of true crime.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Suffering delivered me directly to poetry.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Not until I started erasure poetry did I ever start out with a larger project in mind. It was always poem by poem with me. Even now when I focus on a particular source text for erasure I like to approach every poem as its own entity and put the others out of my head. How many moods and tenses and forms and attitudes can spring from one source? Thousands. I don’t go in with a hammer.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Can I be both? If not, I’m more a writer of short pieces that either begin to cohere with others, or don’t.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

This is a hard one because I live in two countries, neither of which has English as a native language, so I can count my public readings on two hands even if you include Zoom. As a visual poet, I am trepidatious about readings mostly because of technology — I need a beamer/projector and screen or surface, etc. I fret about slides not working, batteries dying. This clobbers me with worry, but takes my focus off my person, which is what most public readers worry about!

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

My work has a lot to do with making the most of restrictions. My poems are sometimes trying to sort out a problem, if not explicitly. I want my poems to be beautiful and/or fun and/or haunting but also to be pragmatic in a way, since in each case I am trying to work myself out of a box that puts constraints on what I can do.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Different writers can have different roles, but we all reflect the times we live in. Each writer passes along a way of looking at the world, of being within it.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I’ve never really experienced a meddlesome editor. At Sarabande, I love(d) my editor, Kristen Miller. She is so smart and insightful and she helps me make better decisions.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

As a woman, it’s to make yourself a priority.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to visual work)? What do you see as the appeal?

With text I am able to focus on words without visual considerations butting in. If I am doing collage alone it’s usually just to help me get away from myself.

In terms of having moved from writing poetry of words & white space to poetry that is text+visual, I travelled over in the blink of an eye.

I had been writing poetry for years when it struck me to combine found poetry with collage and multimedia. I love the associations the visual elements conjure, even without being deliberately connected to the text. I also love collage in and of itself. Being confined to the small canvas of the page, with the arrangement of text I’ve wound up with, is a deeply pleasurable challenge.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

My day job and travel obligations mean I don’t have a routine. I snatch at time in the evening when I can, and on the weekends or a day off. There’s no daily plan.

But in terms of the overarching routine of how I work, I spend time with the text first and foremost, and the visuals follow. Very rarely do I have any visual image in mind at the outset, even if collages I’ve done independently of any poem wheedle their way into a piece.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I go to my favorite poets: Charles Wright, Vasko Popa, Emily Kendal Frey, Lesle Lewis, Mary Ann Samyn, Alfred Starr Hamilton, Victoria Chang. Too many to name. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

My husband’s cologne.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Visual art is a big influence, of course. There are so many great collage artists, but I also love painting and textile work. I wish life were longer and I could find time to learn to paint and to become better at sewing.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Let me go with non-poetry here: Edouard Leve’s Autoportrait, Proust’s Swann’s Way, Lydia Davis, David Markson, Fleur Jaeggy, Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books, Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9 - Fog. I love short, enigmatic writing. I also love the rhapsodic.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Not get sick on a boat on the sea.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’d love to design book covers. But I don’t think I would have taken that path as a younger person because I wasn’t in an environment where such a possibility would have occurred to me. I’ve been a reporter, a NOW canvasser, a professor, a temp secretary, a dog sitter and cold caller. If I could become something else it might be an ecoterrorist or the space shuttle or a bottle of scotch.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Writing was the highest good in my childhood household. My parents read and talked about books, my father was a writer. If I’d grown up among shepherds or glass blowers it might have been different.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

If I may, I’ll bundle the books I’ve read over the past four years by Annie Ernaux into one — The Years, I Remain in Darkness, Happening, A Woman’s Story, A Man’s Place, Shame, Simple Passion. Ernaux’s recollections are close yet distant, scant on outright emotion. She tells the human story plain, without the attitude and posing that plague so much memoir.

As for film, I feel I see movies a lot less frequently now than before the pandemic. Whether it was great or not I don’t know but I loved Toni Erdmann. I loved Sandra Hüller’s performance, how she captured something about the German personality. It was funny and sad. I’ve watched it a number of times.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’ve got a new project going with an American classic that suffuses me with secret pleasure! It’s erasure/collage like my previous work, but feels different, simpler.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;