Book Review

Elizabeth Jacobson’s third collection of poems explores the polarities at the very heart of mortal existence—birth and death, beauty and violence, shame and desire—showing how they link us not only to each other but also to the wider living world. Its opening question sets the tone for the collection: “What is the sword so sharp that a feather blown against it cuts away delusion?” Positioned as a prologue, the question, along with its lyric reply, instantly highlights binaries, organic/inorganic, human/nonhuman, and self/other among them, as fantasy. As much as we try to “conjure distinction,” the speaker asserts, each separation masks a single web of relation with each part cut from something larger than itself: “There are as many songs in the world as branches of coral: / Each one a glorious, brutal dream.”

Serving as a launch point for the first among three sections, “Quantum Foam” drops readers at the porous, fluctuating borders between species. Giving Jacobson’s work a sense of stakes, like both the collection’s title and the prologue poem do, “Quantum Foam” evokes coral: an organism that, resembling small flowering trees attached to rocks at the bottom of the sea, had been considered a sea plant for centuries until it was recognized as an animal, a so-called polyp. Echoing coral’s varied integration into botanical taxonomy, “Quantum Foam” lyrically captures the fluid boundaries between organisms and their environment:

Sea cows sleep by the side of a splintered dock, a cluster of them

under the shallow water,

their wide backs covered in algae like mounds of bleached coral.

Every few minutes one floats up for air,

then drifts back down to the bottom,

without fully waking.

They will do this for hours, and for a while we try to match

our breath to theirs, and with each other’s.

. . .

as if there were no such thing as empty space,

that even a jar void of substance holds emptiness as if it were full.

The blending of bodies in the image of sea cows “covered in algae like mounds of bleached coral” evokes material connection and unity, but also loss as warming oceans threaten to bleach and eradicate corals expelling the algae that live in their tissues. It speaks to the severance of living beings from each other as well as place. Extending beyond a casual, playful gesture, the speaker’s attempt to “match our breath to theirs, and with each other’s” is an urgent reminder of our embodied relationship to rhythms and cycles at risk of dissolving. Attending to our breath that we share with all life forms and to that which binds our breath—air—means to engage, the poem seems to suggest, not only with forces that nourish and sustain, but also with wounds and injuries. Difficult to grasp and hold, intangible emotions that pool inside a body “holding emptiness as if it were full” are like stuck energy waiting for release.

The emphasis on cycles of entanglement where “nothing is made less by dying” draws a thread through the collection. In “The Sweetness of Each Other’s Bodies,” Jacobson’s poetics builds a world in which her role of careful observer, along with ours, turns into one of inhabitant and agent:

Although October days are still hot, I harvest the winter squash,

. . .

The ropy umbilicus is easy to cut,

so I finish the work quickly, take my clothes off,

make a pillow of my shirt and lie down

in the high desert meadow of browning yellow gamma.

. . .

Above, bees and June bugs swarm.

Each one lit with its own current,

which follows the insect like a contrail.

Yesterday I gathered the honeybees in my gloved hands,

dropped them into jars,

and dusted them with powdered sugar to kill the mites.

The bees become ecstatic when released,

eat the sweetness off each other’s bodies.

Before dusk I walk into the nature conserve,

take my seat on the bench above the pond.

All autumn I’ve watched two beavers gorge on water lilies.

. . .

Through my binoculars

I watch their anticipation, then I see their mouths meet.

They press their lips together, and hold them there.

The scene captures the leisurely relish of blending into the landscape—lying undressed “in the high desert meadow of browning yellow gamma”—and of visceral contact with fruit ready for harvest. The reader is drawn into the dismantling of borders as Jacobson blurs the lines of human and nonhuman gestures unspooling from a living tapestry of sugar sprinkling hands, electric currents, and kissing beavers. As bodily borders fade into the background, the reader cannot help but feel the weight of separation drop, giving the poem a sense of lightness at every turn.

Where “Ars Poetica with Pine Roots” extends this ease and abundance into the realm of art, conjuring the natural world as an inexhaustible fountain of creation with “pine roots / spreading their ballads into the earth . . . no reason / to empty what fills and fills,” other poems come with darker, threatening fringes. In “One Taste,” the taste of the sea unwinds with a verve that is both thrilling and scary, beginning with flavors of a prehistoric serpent, moonlight, and zooplankton yet quickly spiraling outwards to include “dark globs / of sticky tar, metallic treasure chests of sunken gold and jewels, / harmful algae blooms, feces from cruise ships . . . poisonous syrups.” In “Hour of Lead,” a litany of the consequences of a planet covered in concrete “inflames the mind like grit in an eye” and makes you feel “like a tongue cut from a mouth.” The visceral imagery suggests how our senses, along with plants and animals, are injured and torn from their natural habitats. Throughout the collection, Jacobson reveals both the beauty and the mystery of processes obscured by modern life: from the butterscotch scent of ponderosa bark to male black widows sacrificing themselves after courtship. Set against an emphasis on the raw, inscrutable nature of vegetal and animal life, poems that turn towards human tragedy—the death of a newborn, suicide, murder—teach us about the “creaturely, sensory” impulses we share with our fellow living beings.

Some of the book’s most startling moments come when Jacobson lets the human mask slip in a series of autobiographical—or autobiographical-sounding—poems. In “A Brown Stone,” the speaker ventures into the darkest corners of human experience: childhood recollections shadowed by the death of a baby sister and a mysterious medical condition resulting in feelings of isolation and shame. It is when the child, through an adult’s eyes, physically connects with the earth and its living creatures, driven as much or more by instinct as by the effort to grasp concepts such as death or illness, that the reader finds relief from the dense language of pain and anguish:

Lying down at the base of a massive oak, in

front of an opening in the trunk like a small cave, a

perfect diorama of a cave, where something warm

could get in, like a chipmunk or a squirrel, and make

a home, I saw withered roots hanging down from

the top like long slender fingers, felt them caress

my back as I tucked in. There was an animal curled

up inside my tall little girl body like an embryo in a

specimen jar floating in formaldehyde, but coming

alive, stirring, inch by inch—a caterpillar becoming

a moth—something confident and untaught.

Not merely bent upon self-preservation and survival, the child’s impulse to “tuck in” at the “base of a massive oak” reflects an instinctive understanding of her place in the world, exposing the primordial link between the human and the nonhuman. This promise of confidence and openness towards the world is dimmed by the weight of intergenerational and historical trauma in “There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral.” The poem opens with a walk along a beach that brings back the speaker’s younger self’s fascination with “prying starfish from pools / sucked salt / off their legs, / curious podia searching / my tongue . . . put anything in my mouth / to know it.” Midway into the poem, the speaker’s reality of a walk along a reef-depleted beach carries past childhood scenes towards a concentration camp, embedding images of “bodies overflowing / from wheelbarrows. / Corpses pitched / in heaps like firewood.” This sudden shift is a potent reminder that all bodies—coral reefs, amphibians, birds—are susceptible to extermination, and that the human body is no exception. Much of what the speaker contemplates leads her back to a desire, or rather hunger, to know, to hold, and to be transformed by some of the darkest of human experiences—from an ocean’s “bloody / earthy smell” to traces of dehumanizing mass violence: “I pulled a rusty hair pin / from the soil / put it in my mouth—/ Seventy-five-year-old tarnish / a perfumed / female essence.”

Jacobson’s collection takes the reader through a range of poetic territories—rhapsodies, lullabies, and devotionals—gifting feelings in equal measure tender, grief-inducing, and comforting. With the soil carrying the flavors of trauma, fires raging in all directions, coyotes chewing on dead birds’ legs, and burying beetles mating on top of a mouse carcass, the collection is a far cry from a pastoral. It never fully lets us off the hook: “What is the lure of this world? . . . things deteriorate / before they get a chance to become whole. / A budding flower withers as it peaks / and exactly what’s right with the world / is exactly what’s wrong with the world.” As treacherous and broken as the world may be and as insatiable as our desire for wholeness, I think of the collection as the best we can do by way of expressing ourselves: something with no single identity and disposed to constant reinvention. What matters the most, it seems to say, is how to navigate the struggle toward connection in the face of its unsettling ambiguity. As the speaker declares, “blessed is not / what you receive in this life, blessed is how you renounce it.” What is so admirable about Jacobson’s collection is the ease with which she integrates her own family and daily doings with human and nonhuman histories and imaginaries, resulting in deeply layered, allusive poems that leave her readers with the joy to puzzle and parse.