Book Review

Hadara Bar-Nadav’s The Animal Is Chemical is a poetry collection in which generational trauma, global history, illness, and the ways in which an individual copes and medicates—literally and figuratively. Bar-Nadav’s poems rely on a variety of figures and people, ranging from the malevolent spirits in Jewish folklore, to family members, to members of the Nazi party who faced trial for their crimes during the Holocaust. The Animal Is Chemical is psychological, emotionally ravaging, and a feverish examination of how an individual creates a self and future from the wreckage of their inherited past.

One of the collection’s most striking poems is its opening one, “Dybbuk.” The dybbuk is a malevolent spirit in Jewish folklore that possesses a living person, and in Bar-Nadav’s poem, it is a being—and a speaker—for which one might feel great sympathy. The initial self-description the speaker provides a sense of erasure: “My horns are disappearing, / parts of my furred ears / rub away in the wind.” The wind is the erasure source, a force so powerful that it “can take you / in pieces.” The speaker feels imminent destruction as they admit, “Someone is trying to burn the girl / out of me.” The images that follow are surreal and jarringly haunting: “Diamonds line my eye sockets, / diamonds in my fever-lit brain. / My neck, a fat matchstick.” Beauty balances ugliness, and the dybbuk’s description of itself is a delicate dance in which light stabilizes darkness. The closing lines, however, are lines that set not only the poem’s tone, but the collection’s: “A myth in which a god sets us / on fire and then sets us free.” The word “myth” is an interesting choice, implying that what is about to be told—either by the dybbuk or another character—is probably not true. The image of a “god” who sets the collective “us” on fire in order to “free” them also establishes the collection’s constant flux of cyclical creation and destruction.

Another poem in which the folkloric and mythological collide with the historical and personal is “Wolf Child.” Set in Babyn Yar in Kyiv, Ukraine during September 1941—when SS and German authorities perpetuated one World War II’s largest mass killings—the poem echoes the poetic narratives in Marianna Kiyanovska’s The Voices of Babyn Yar. The poem is deceivingly simplistic, structurally and linguistically. However, its harrowing emotional tug emerges due to the stunted lines, which—at most—consist of only four words:

A girl rose
out of a wolf,

peeled the soft fur
back, ripped

across her hips.

The deviation and subtle indentation of the phrase “across her hips” sensationalizes the poem by mimicking the words “rose,” “peeled,” and “ripped.” The lines “What have I done / to survive—” center the poem. A small, imagistic litany uncoils:

wrist bones
still wrenched,

electricity
of breath

wired
through my teeth.

The echo created by “wrist” and “wrenched” and “wired” generates movement within the lines. The sensation of being “wrenched” is reinforced by the periods which punctuate lines 17 and 19:

Feral, febrile,
fear-streaked.

The bloodline
severed here—.

The concluding em dash mirrors the em dash utilized in line 9 and acts as a quiet stabilization.

“The Ancestors Take the Reins of My Throat” is another ancestral meditation in which Bar-Nadav’s talent for harnessing the past and rendering it to contextualize the present—and even the future—gleams. Ancestral legacy and generational trauma are paramount themes in the poem. The speaker shares:

There is always a we

in my mouth, huddled

against my teeth. I start

to speak and out pours

smoke with a leathered

bit of tongue.

Again, shape plays an integral role in the poem. The lines’ indentation imitates phrases like “out pours” and even the image of the leathered tongue. As the poem continues, other lines—such as “Numbers inked onto / the vellum skin of history”—perpetuate the sense of ancestral legacy and generational trauma carried by the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. The grief, pain, and trauma extend from the poem’s “we” to the “I” as the poem segues towards its conclusion: “by love, as I am // a shell for others—.” The word “love” creates a sense of familial intimacy, while the word “shell” betrays this intimacy and suggests a hollowness, a separation or an emptiness the speaker cannot quite understand but is forced to accept. Again, a delicate balance is struck within the lines because of the word choice and image placement—a placement that reflects the speaker’s own balancing act between their self and how their ancestry and history inform and shape that self.

“The Hook of History,” which appears near the collection’s end, is a poem in which “suffering circles itself and repeats” and under “the guise of alcohol” the speaker grows “charming and unrecognizable.” A poem that can be interpreted about the perpetuation of the cycles of violence, self-abuse, and violence that ravage one’s life, it is another exceptional example of Bar-Nadav’s aptitude for linguistic and structural balance. “The past arrives with its staple gun and rusted alphabet,” states the speaker—a line that is a launch into images of Nazis chasing the speaker’s grandmother “until she dies” and chasing the speaker’s mother “in her sleep.” The past’s horrors creep into the present, and ghosts “of women sign in the stairwells through mottled lips.” What concludes the cycle is one of the few hopeful moments in Bar-Nadav’s verses: “Children in the courtyard scream and scream, and there is joy in this.” The image of the children and their joy is an image of redemption, of an innocence that gives one hope for a better future.

The Animal Is Chemical is a poetic catalogue of the terrors and the horrors in precise language and thought-provoking structure. More so, the collection arrives at a time when global democracy precariously teeters on a cliff’s edge. Psychologically riveting, the generational stories, cultural folklores, and personal reconciliations in Bar-Nadav’s poems are a quiet reminder about the human cost at stake during these sociopolitically perilous times.