Cassie Donish, The Year of the Femme

This seems to be the pattern

Going outside is part of the pattern too

Each day there are fewer leaves on the trees

Each day there are more leaves in the street

Time is a puzzle with interlocking parts

Interlocking parts are meant to be unlocked

Each bit of metal has its own form

Although people are similar to each other

Each person is having a distinct experience

She is wearing a necklace of amber

Amber is the color of the day

It is the color of being a woman

At night she removes it (“Portrait of a Woman, Mid-Fall”)

I’d heard some excitement around the publication of American poet Cassie Donish’s second full-length poetry title, The Year of the Femme (University of Iowa Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Iowa Poetry Prize (as judged by Brenda Shaughnessy) and a follow-up to their debut, Beautyberry (Slope Editions, 2018).  Set in five sections that alternate between those comprised of a single, extended sequence and those built out of shorter, self-contained pieces—“Portrait of a Woman, Mid-Fall,” “One Fluent Green Blaze,” “Heat Waves,” “A Gale” and “The Year of the Femme”—Donish’s The Year of the Femme is constructed as a suite of sharp and self-aware meditative lyrics that explore identity, belonging, pain, sexuality and gender. “At the edge of a field a thought waits,” they write, in the opening suite/section “Portrait of a Woman, Mid-Fall,” continuing: “Putting it this way gives agency to the thought / It’s important to her that it can be said this way [.]” Donish writes openly of loss, such as the sequence/section “Heat Waves,” writing of a friend who’s “Boat capsized, the body / Not found,” writing of the heart-rending open-endedness of six days later, “His body still / Exists somewhere / Beneath the blue / Corruption, a storage / Of stars [.]”

Someone said a journey starts with voice. I grew up swimming in a slow-moving river, in words like sister and girls. I knew a waist was supposed to be soft, knew when it should be covered, when revealed. Now I move through terminals, other places move through me, other words. I follow a sign, I refuse to neaten the disorder. Each object is assigned a role, a gender. Eye shadow. Boxers. Musk. Bruise.

The pleasure he said / Finding one’s way

In a new body / My star anise

My amber, powder / His eyes I painted

Touched his waist / Felt a pulse

There / (I felt her pulse (“The Year of the Femme”)

Donish's poems are quite remarkable, stretching out the body of a long thought, writing a poetry book as much a singular, book-length consideration as an assemblage of individual poems. In “A Conversation with Cassie Donish,” conducted by Andy Stallings for THERMOS (posted February 13, 2014), Donish responds:

I think maybe sequences suit my temperament. If you’ve ever walked around with me all day, or for a week, which you have, you know I like it when conversations have many threads, and the threads can be interrupted by events (like swimming in a river, or buying ice cream) but then returned to suddenly in a single breath, without syntactic regard for the hours or days that have passed; for instance, resuming a prior conversation with gestures like “But what about…?” or “And anyway…” Maybe poets are like this in general, maybe people are? I think the sequence is a form that suits this mental state; it turns out that a single breath can be hours or weeks or years long. Who wants finality and complete thoughts? I love coffee, but my coffee often gets cold over and over, and I have to warm it up again. It becomes almost a game: how many times can I genuinely forget it’s sitting there, this thing I do want? Maybe I don’t like for the cup of coffee to end.

This collection does very much feel like a journey, one both difficult and incredibly rewarding, enlightening and fraught with peril, moving through memory, childhood and how those experiences impact the people we become (and wish to become), such as the final quarter of the poem “The Year Before or After / A Vulnerable Look,” that reads:

[…] Say memory is a colony

of various residues—the smell of oranges

in summer, a line of a song,

someone’s hand on my ass in a room

in winter, the voices of my parents,

my fear of the news, a photo of apple roses

baked by a man who could be

my father. The wish for fathers, a clover-shaped

window, its chamber of clover-shaped light.

Laura Walker, story

if the story like a river. loose and fretful, twine. if a story with debris and froth, pulling from the banks as it comes, never the same river twice, step in and be renewed. if glass-bottomed boats and red-dotted fishes. if another line just under the surface, if you can’t see without drowning, if sometimes in storm, sometimes becalmed. if each person carries her own boat, dam, leaf. cutting its own way through or swept along and over the cliff, story as waterfall and prismed light, story as gravity.

Berkeley, California poet Laura Walker’s [see her "12 or 20 questions" interview here] fifth poetry collection, following swarm lure (Battery Press, 2004), rimertown/ an atlas (University of California Press, 2008), bird book (Shearsman Books, 2011) and Follow-Haswed (Apogee Press, 2012) [see my review of such here] is story (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2016). Composed as a sequence of stand-alone prose fragments, story provides an enormous amount of narrative detail, accumulating story upon story, thickening the length and breadth of it, but the thread of her story still manages to remain elusive. As she writes: “a story as skin. boundary, temperature, delineation. what she was told and what she was making fuzzy scratches in the dark.” Each of her prose poems encapsulate a sequence of small moments, extending the collection via accumulation, but one that refuses to remain static, or straightforward. “[T]o make a story move someone has to give,” she writes, as Walker engages with the mutability and contradictions inherent in storytelling. Just what kind of story is she attempting to tell? 

she was seven. she was never seven. she stood on a small hill and looked behind her; she became her own character; she viewed the world through glass. the touch of sheets against her legs fades like vowels in ink, throb of a piano through a wall. a mattress as it sputters toward flame; desperate dogs down each man’s throat, eyes as big as branches. her eyes were glass where they could not see.

In an interview posted at Thermos on January 1, 2015, she discusses the project, still (then) very much a work-in-progress:

I’m in the last stages (I think) of a manuscript I’ve been working on for about a year. It’s a series of prose blocks circling around ideas of story and its manifestations, weaving characters, fairy tales, family stories, and memories, both “real” and created. Sometimes I say it’s as close to writing a novel as I’ll ever get, which is not very close. But there was something that felt “novelistic” for me as I wrote it, for example the ways in which I needed to erect a structure and simultaneously keep it aloft while turning my attention elsewhere—like putting up a circus tent and drawing something obscure and difficult on the floor at the same time. Destined for failure but exhilarating too.

In my mind it departs quite a bit from what I’ve written previously. And that’s part of what I’ve enjoyed about it—the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing, at all—the unfamiliarity. I’ve always been most comfortable with partial narrative, pieces of stories, multiple and shifting and overlapping—I have a huge distrust of anything that presents itself as complete, of beginnings and endings, of story arcs. So in this project I’ve had to write alongside my discomfort. Even though the stories here are still fragmented and incomplete, they’re central and substantive in a way that’s new for me. I’ve had to fight, hard, against my natural inclination to take things out, to subtract. Narrative here is, in some way, the point—not a hazy aura or shifting backdrop or ghostly presence—even though it’s still all those things, too, at least I hope. Anyway, it’s made me really uncomfortable, in a great way. I can feel myself having to reach toward new ways of holding things.

I was haunted by a lot of things while I wrote it. By my own experience of memory, especially of the way my memory now has gaps and holes since a concussion a few years ago, with new gaps being created all the time— and what that means for identity, “truth,” the communal, for creating something. By listening to my grandmother’s memories turn more and more gauzy over a period of years. By my visceral memories of fairy tales, what I took in and made my own, long ago, what I recreated, and perhaps why. By the idea of story as a character, with her own needs and trajectory. By my reading about recovered memories. By the idea of our body as a story we tell ourselves, and what that means for boundaries, transgression, injury. By narrative shape built through layer or repetition or eddies of water, vs. movement over ground and space—a finger rubbing the same circle repeatedly, eroding the surface.