Book Review

In the advanced blurbs for Canese Jarboe’s SISSY, renowned poet CA Conrad ended their blurb calling Canese’s debut collection, “a field for liberation.” From out the gate, Jarboe’s balanced blend of language, from the delicate to the visceral, demonstrates the struggle of what it means to be Queer in the working-class outskirts of Missouri. It was definitely easy for me to see why Conrad put their blessing on this collection. It was also easy to see how apropos “a field for liberation” is for this heartfelt collection.

As our republic continues to swallow the Queer community into the gaping jaws of the dark ages, Jarboe’s poetics provide a guiding light of glitter and Molotov cocktail fire, conjuring a relentless flame of pastoral memory and family, all recognizing the beautiful ember of identity refusing to be burnt out.

Some of the most powerful devices in Jarboe’s literary arsenal are their uses of metaphor and imagery, the lingering refrain of setting connects the ideals of Queer identity with the northern Ozark prairie itself. In the poem, “Economics,” Jarboe delves into their past, surroundings that revisit like well-known ghosts:

our father wishes

we were born calves

Do my nerves misfire Or

do the leaves in the corn field

cling and cut at once . . .

The way farming is framed as a narrative of outdated expectations, the way infantilization has become an ancient norm of the male gaze, and what father’s expect from their offspring just hones in early on the stigmas that surround Jarboe’s confessional of Transmasculine identity.

More than a couple of questions arise. What happens when the monuments of our childhood, these personal field notes in a world woven by pasture are shaped into something more complex? Is there more than what its surface dictates? The poem “Warsh”—which in its context is the Midwest pronunciation of wash—does a great job as one of the several poems answering these questions, laying bare a microcosm for the world to witness:

Wasp in the leg of my mother’s jeans hanging on the line,

You and I (are alike

It will all come out in the

Clothespinned (I need to be a wet bedsheet licking

Legs or licking nothing in the wind

“Warsh” and the following poem, “Not Even with Three Brains Can We Remember,” act as companion pieces for one another, but also polar opposites on familial tension, and the means of family loyalty either by forceful or earnest intentions. Throughout these observations, not only is Jarboe depicting the other side of family—the side clinging to a dying narrative of cisheteronormativity—and adhering to oppressive domestic spheres, but honoring the lives of family that helped give their identity a space to exist in the first place. There’s even a dedication line to Jarboe’s blood siblings in the beginning of “SISSY,” and in the latter poem, “Not Even with Three Brains Can We Remember,” the poet speaks on this dedication so subtly but beautifully, depicting past sibling conflicts, conflicts instead ending in a place of empathy, and understanding:

Something about protecting themselves Our brains

I mean (My baby brain . . .

Never understood how you could find 5 12

26 four-leaf clovers in an afternoon . . .

. . . How lucky are we to have a sibling

With a box full of four-leaf clovers

Who pulls one out to burn

When she worries about us

In a second portion of this book dedicated to Charles Hancock, a local legend in Missouri’s Gay Rodeo scene, the poetics cusped with photos and sketches cast a landscape of pictography paying tribute to the local legend. I still remember when I went to Canese Jarboe’s toured book launch for SISSY at Fitz Books here in Buffalo and how they spoke of Charles in such a way; it was as beautiful as the poetry itself. Reading with that memory intact, the page certainly had a tough act to follow. However, Jarboe does not disappoint at encapsulating his memory well.

One simple quote from Charles kicks off in the titular poem, “SISSY,” and it seems to evolve into a theme for the rest of the collection: “1997. September 18th, he said. Just like that. I kept going back. I kept going back.” And just like that, a new refrain moves through this section in this multi-page scrapbook poem.

Wanting to be legible

I think it’s what found us thrashed by lovers

(Or our lover’s lovers             in the furthest motel

Room down the hall

Charles says he kept going back

And going back

The themes of home and family reintroduce themselves but in a foundlings sense, as Jarboe speaks fondly of found family, and found spaces, and found places, and found romance. Throughout the poem, there is a timeline of photos for Charles, and his own iconoclast, from a late 70s high school portrait of a long-haired gentleman to a couples photo with his beloved husband from several years ago. Sometimes more than one medium is necessary to immerse the reader into the narrative, and Jarboe does a phenomenal job with that argument, hybridizing photography, graphic design and poetics in a gradual, rewarding way.

SISSY is just as much a memoir in many respects as a poetry collection, except the memoir is collective, and its homage doesn’t just pay itself to one person, but rather a whole cast of characters. From blood relatives to adoptive relatives to local icons, community plays such a decisive role in shaping the Queer Ozark narrative for Jarboe. Yes, there are characters worth showing some disdain for, like the unwelcomed auras of parental idealists, the toxic adherence to a society within a valley of domestic spheres. Yet, these moments of sorrow and rage are still superseded by a relentless joy, a feeling that refuses to dwindle away. Jarboe’s poetics provide a compass in examining not only all of the beautiful things lost within their community, but also embracing all of the beautiful things that still remain.